At most, the disasters might knock one-tenth of 1 percentage point off national economic growth in the April-June quarter, Wells Fargo economist Mark Vitner estimates.

View full post on Business Stories

Washington, D.C., United States (AHN) – Leaders of the Latin American and U.S. Hispanic communities continued sharp criticisms Friday against a Supreme Court decision that upholds a tough state law against illegal immigration.

They say the ruling on Thursday will lead to discrimination against Hispanic people.

The Arizona law empowers local police to shut down any business that knowingly hires illegal immigrants.

The Supreme Court ruling is expected to encourage other states to enact similar laws to ensure employees are Americans.

The Obama administration opposed the Arizona law, saying the state was authorizing itself to set immigration policy that the Constitution reserves to the federal government.

The Supreme Court said Arizona was not setting a new immigration policy, merely enforcing the federal laws that already exist.

“Arizona hopes that its law will result in more effective enforcement of the prohibition on employing unauthorized aliens,” Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. wrote for the 5-3 majority.

As a result, “the Arizona regulation does not otherwise conflict with federal law,” he wrote.

Among the first Latin American leaders to criticize the Supreme Court’s decision was Wilbert Bendezu, president of Peru’s Parliament.

He said the Supreme Court’s decision set a “dangerous precedent” that will lead to other laws against immigrants.

Texas, North Carolina, Georgia, Utah, Mississippi, Ohio and Florida all have either enacted or are considering laws against illegal immigration that closely follow the “Legal Arizona Workers Act.”

Bendezu said the Arizona law gives employers no other choice than to fire workers who lack U.S. government work permits.

He estimated that about 600,000 Peruvians live illegally in the United States.

Other criticism came from the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), a civil rights organization for Hispanics.

“Today’s regrettable decision in Chamber of Commerce v. Whiting is a tortured product of judicial activism responding to perceived political views of the moment,” said Thomas A. Saenz, MALDEF’s president.

He hinted that the Supreme Court’s decision could lead to approval of Arizona’s S.B. 1070.

The state law authorizes local police to question and arrest anyone if the officers have “probable cause” evidence they are illegally in the United States. The law is awaiting an appeal to the Supreme Court before it can be enforced.

“Laws that encroach on exclusive federal immigration enforcement by mandating or permitting untrained local police officers to engage in racial profiling will find little refuge in today’s decision,” Saenz said. “Wise state and local lawmakers must continue to tread carefully in areas touching on immigration. As has been the case for well over 200 years, federal action remains the sole legitimate avenue to address immigration issues.”

Dissenters on the Supreme Court largely agreed that Arizona lawmakers overstepped their authority with the Legal Arizona Workers Act.

“Either directly or through the uncertainty that it creates, the Arizona statute will impose additional burdens upon lawful employers,” Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in dissent.

The other dissenters were Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor.

Breyer wrote that employers now are likely to “erect ever stronger safeguards against the hiring of unauthorized aliens, without counterbalancing protections against unlawful discrimination.”

The Arizona law also requires employers to check the immigration status of all job applicants using an online federal background check program called E-Verify.

The Supreme Court ruling said E-Verify was “entirely consistent” with federal law.

About 215,000 employers nationwide have enrolled voluntarily in the E-Verify program. South Carolina and Mississippi also require employers to do E-Verify background checks.

Some members of Congress have said recently they plan to introduce bills requiring E-Verify checks nationally.

View full post on All Stories

Washington, DC, United States (AHN) – The top U.S. defense official on Tuesday argued against proposed Administration defense budget cuts, cautioning they would affect overall military inventory that American forces desperately need due to the ongoing wars.

Addressing an audience at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based think tank, Gates minced no words. “The overarching goal will be to preserve a U.S. military capable of meeting crucial national security priorities even if fiscal pressure requires reductions in that force’s size,” he said. “I’ve said repeatedly that I’d rather have a smaller, but superbly capable military than a larger, hollow, less capable one.”

President Barack Obama has proposed to cut $400 billions over the next decade from security agency budgets, but observers feel the big chunk of cuts would come from the Defense Department.

Gates, who is relinquishing his post next month, went down memory lane to hit out at Washington policy makers saying, “Our record of predicting where we will use military force since Vietnam is perfect — we have never once gotten it right.”

Answering questions after his speech, Gates said, “There isn’t a single instance: Grenada, Panama, the first Gulf War, the Balkans, Haiti, you can just keep going through the list, where we knew and planned for such a conflict six months in advance.”

Citing the Mideast group Hezbollah as having more missiles and rockets than most states and possibly chemical or biological warheads, Gates cautioned, “We need to have in mind the greatest possible flexibility and versatility for the broadest range of conflict.”

Also in the Middle East, the outgoing defense secretary warned Iraq against regional threats. “The Iraqi military would say they need continued assistance in terms of logistics, intelligence,” Gates said. “They have no capacity to defend their own airspace.”

Gates suggested, “There are some areas where we could continue to assist them, and I think at relatively small cost to ourselves, especially given the investment that has already been made.”

“As is often the case in Iraq, it will take some time for the political leaders to figure out a way to move forward on this,” he added. “… I hope they figure out a way to ask and I think that the United States would be willing to say yes when that time comes.”

Earlier, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell told journalists the secretary is being helpful to his successor, CIA Director Leon Panetta, noting that, “This process is beginning under Secretary Gates. It is one he has devised.”

“But ultimately it is going to be seen through to fruition by his successor and I don’t think he wants to constrain his successor in any way in terms of how to get at these savings,” Morrell added.

View full post on All Stories

Dhaka, Bangladesh (AHN) – Hours after the news elusive Osama bin Laden had been killed by United States forces, Bangladesh authorities geared up security for all westerners, especially diplomats and citizens of the United States and Britain.

The Ministry of Home Affairs, in a special meeting on Monday, advised all security units to remain on high alert. Additional police security personnel were deployed to ensure safety and security of the U.S. and British embassies, establishments and business places in Bangladesh.

Bangladesh in an initial reaction termed the death of Laden, as a major development in the global war on terror. According to the Foreign Ministry spokesperson, the government “unequivocally condemns terrorism in all its forms and manifestations in the strongest possible terms.”

Security checkposts in the diplomatic zone in the capital Dhaka have been strengthened.

Police and security agencies confirmed that no protest rallies were held nor were banners or black flags hoisted in the capital or elsewhere in the country.

Afternoon commuters were surprised to read the news of bin Laden’s death from an afternoon newspaper.

On the other hand, security agencies are vigilant of pro Al-Qaeda groups and organizations having links with the international terror networks, officials said.

Security specialist retired Gen. M. Muniruzzaman on Monday said the absence of bin Laden will have an impact on dreaded Harkatul Jihad al Islam (HuJI), which received funding, training and political support from Al Qaeda. He added that Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) still basks in the Jihadist doctrines of bin Laden.

Some 36 extremist organizations are known to exist in Bangladesh. Six of them are banned in Bangladesh, Muniruzzaman said.

View full post on All Stories

Tokyo, Japan (AHN) – Beijing and Seoul have kept restrictions on the importation of food from Japan a trilateral trade deal brokered on Sunday

Japanese Trade Minister Banri Kaieda asked its two Asian neighbors to ease the restrictions on food imports from Japan, put in place after the March 11 earthquake, tsunami and subsequent nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facility.

Chinese Commerce Minister Chen Derning and South Korean Trade Minister Jim Jonh Hoon told Kaieda that their first priority is public safety and their current measures are based on scientific evidence in response to a request from the Japanese minister that the restrictions be based on scientific fact.

Beijing banned all food, agricultural and fishery product imports from the prefectures near Fukushima, while Seoul will require Japan to issue certificates of safety for food products from prefectures affected by the radioactive emissions.

The ministers agreed that the free flow of trade and investment among their countries was vital to sustaining economic growth in the south Asia region. The three economies are seeking to hike trade within the region because of lower demand from the U.S. and Europe, which are still grappling with the aftermath of the recession and the global financial crisis.

The group established a joint study committee made up of government officials, businesses and academics to study the feasibility of a signing a formal trilateral free trade agreement.

View full post on All Stories

Washington, DC, United States (KaiserHealth) – Like many other interest groups, the medical device industry met with White House officials in the run-up to the health care battle in Congress. But while insurers, pharmaceutical firms and even the American Medical Association made agreements trading their support for specific concessions, the device makers were not able to close a similar deal.

As a result, the final health care reform bill included a 2.3 percent excise tax on device makers that’s expected to produce $20 billion over a decade to help pay for expanded health coverage.

That’s the law, or so it would seem.

But in Washington, it’s never over until it’s over. And like other medical interests who are scrambling to influence the implementation of health care reform, medical device makers are showering cash on friends in Congress and working the halls, hoping that one of five bills that would overturn the excise tax might actually make it into law.

Veteran Hill watchers say that may be a long shot, so to hedge its bets, the industry is also lobbying the Internal Revenue Service to write rules exempting hundreds of devices from the excise tax — even though the health law says the exemption should be limited to items widely purchased by the public from retailers. The outcome of that under-the-radar battle is far from certain.

The medical device business and its lobbyists have a strong record of winning concessions and at least partially deflecting the costs of health insurance coverage expansion. An early Senate “framework” version of the health bill pushed by Democrat Max Baucus of Montana, for example, would have nailed the industry with a $40 billion excise tax bill over ten years beginning in 2010. Shocked at the price tag, the device manufacturers’ trade group, the Advanced Medical Technology Association (AdvaMed), pushed back, aided by industry giants Medtronic Inc., Johnson & Johnson, 3M Co., and others.

With the help of a bipartisan group of lawmakers, the device makers succeeded in cutting the tax in half in the final health care law, which also delayed the start date for the tax until 2013, three years later than in the Baucus proposal.

Manufacturers, however, maintain that even the smaller tax in the health care law is catastrophic for them. So the industry is targeting Capitol Hill anew and working the regulatory process, searching for concessions.

Five industry-supported bills currently before Congress would completely overturn the excise tax on medical devices, the most widely supported of which are bills introduced by Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and Rep. Erik Paulsen, R-Minn. Hatch’s bill has- Republican co-sponsors. Paulsen’s House bill has 119 co-sponsors, including three Democrats.

Hatch, who has been one of the health care law’s fiercest opponents, says the tax on medical devices will increase insurance premiums and the cost of care. Relying on an excise tax “to fund Obamacare will cripple an important engine of opportunity, job growth and innovation,” Hatch said in a January news release.

CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS FROM INDUSTRY

In 2009 and 2010, both Hatch and Paulsen were major beneficiaries of medical device industry money.

Hatch was not up for re-election that cycle but received more than $90,000 in campaign donations from the medical supply industry, which made him the trade group’s third largest political beneficiary, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The political action committee of the AdvaMed association alone contributed $10,584 to Hatch’s campaign, and $3,150 to Paulsen’s.

The political action committees of individual companies also chipped in. The PAC of Boston Scientific, a major manufacturer of heart and other medical devices, contributed $7,000 to Paulsen’s campaign and $5,000 to Hatch’s. Medtronic, the world’s largest medical device maker — which is based in Paulsen’s home state — donated $3,000 to Paulsen and $5,000 to Hatch.

Paulsen spokesman Tom Erickson said the bill is a response to job loss fears, not industry campaign donations, and that more than 400 medical device companies are based in Minnesota. A Hatch spokesman said the senator’s bill reflects his political philosophy: “It’s something he has felt strongly about for a long time, that taxes are counterproductive,” spokesman Mark Eddington said.

Hatch and Paulsen are only two of the friends the device industry is counting on for help.

In late March, Democrat Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Republican Scott Brown of Massachusetts launched a new Senate medical technology caucus to increase awareness about issues facing the industry. Both represent states with significant medical device manufacturers and have been major beneficiaries of industry money.

Boston Scientific, which in 2010 had $7.8 billion in sales, is based in Brown’s state. In 2010, Brown received more than $30,000 in campaign donations from the medical supply industry, which is dominated by the device makers. Klobuchar received more than $40,000 in contributions.

“These businesses not only spark medical breakthroughs, they save lives,” Klobuchar said in comments released on the day the new caucus was launched. “Every day in every state small medical technology companies are driving the innovation agenda we need to compete in a global economy. I will continue to work to make sure that Minnesota remains a leader in health care innovation by developing innovative products while maintaining patient safety.”

The House medical technology caucus was revamped in February. According to the industry newsletter MedCity, its new website was launched on the same day that Paulsen, who chairs the group together with Anna Eschoo, D-Calif., addressed the Minnesota life sciences trade group LifeScience Alley.

In the halls of Congress, the medical device manufacturers have long pushed the jobs refrain, first to deflect taxes, and second to fend off scrutiny from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which regulates devices. Dr. Josh Makower, the founder of Exploramed, a medical device incubator – who frequently testifies before Congress – said the excise tax will particularly hurt small firms, many of which rely solely on investment capital for years before turning a profit.

“The saddest thing is that these small companies are exactly the ones that are delivering new innovations,” Makower told iWatch News in an e-mail response to questions.

REVOLVING DOOR

In pushing its interests, the device industry benefits from the revolving door connecting K Street with Capitol Hill.

In December, former AdvaMed executive Brett Loper, who lobbied against the excise tax, was named House Speaker John Boehner’s chief policy officer. Elizabeth Kegler, the association’s vice president of government affairs, is a former health policy advisor to Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa.

Advamed spent almost $1.5 million lobbying Congress on behalf of its members in 2010. First quarter lobby disclosure records for 2011 will not be available until late April, but medical device industry activity suggests the industry has likely not slowed its spending.

Despite device industry campaign donations, powerful allies, and support for the Paulsen bill in the House, George Schutzer, a tax lobbyist and attorney at the Washington firm Patton Boggs, said he doubts Congress is ready to overturn the device tax. A win for the medical device industry would “open the flood gates” for challenges to the health reform bill by other parts of the medical industry, Schutzer said, and would most likely result in an Obama veto.

As a result, the medical device industry has taken the fight beyond Congress to the Internal Revenue Service, which will administer the tax.

That part of the struggle appears to be splitting the industry as manufacturers try to protect their market niches. Although the medical device category includes big-ticket items generally sold to hospitals, including artificial hearts, pacemakers, coronary stents and artificial joints, it also includes a wide range of less expensive items ranging from tongue depressors to examination gloves.

The health law exempts from the excise tax eyeglasses, contact lenses, and any device the Treasury Department determines is generally purchased by the general public at retail for individual use. Certain sectors of the device industry, however, contend that devices from wheelchairs and scooters to home oxygen systems fit the exemption criteria.

In written comments to the IRS, which is expected to publish tax guidance for device manufacturers, DJO Global, the largest U.S. supplier of orthopedic devices, asked for an exemption on all items classified by Medicare as durable medical equipment, prosthetics and orthotics, including bone-growth stimulators and electrotherapy devices. The American Association for Home Care, which represents the home medical care industry, wrote that it believes all durable medical equipment, including complex power wheel chairs, should be exempt.

“Durable medical equipment and home medical equipment fit that exemption language to a tee,” said Jay Witter, senior director of government affairs at the American Association for Home Care, in an interview. Witter quoted a 2009 fact sheet released by former Speaker Nancy Pelosi that said wheelchairs would be exempt, and that the excise tax would apply only to sales of medical devices to hospitals and other institutions. The comment period on the exemption ended in late March; the IRS did not respond to questions on when it might decide who gets the exemption and who doesn’t.

Witter said it is unclear whether wheelchairs and other durable medical equipment were included in revenue calculations that projected $20 billion in revenue from the tax over a decade’s time. But since the majority of home health customers are covered by Medicare, which pays set rates, Witter said the cost of the excise tax cannot be passed on to consumers.

Diana Zuckerman, president of the National Research Center for Women & Families, a think tank that focuses on health issues, said the idea that all durable medical equipment should be exempt from the excise tax is absurd and could impair funding for the health care law.

“If they get what they want, the whole health care bill collapses,” said Zuckerman. “There is too much money involved to get rid of the excise tax or to substantially lower it.”

TAX DEDUCTION WINDFALL?

As device manufactures plead for exemptions, hospitals and group purchasing organizations worry that those who remain on the hook for the tax may simply pass it on in higher prices to hospitals and other purchasers. Curtis Rooney, president of the Health Industry Group Purchasing Association, said the excise tax could even wind up being a windfall for medical device manufacturers.

In a letter to the IRS, Rooney’s organization, along with the American Hospital Association, the Federation of American Hospitals and the Catholic Health Association of the United States, wrote that device manufacturers should be prohibited from passing on the excise tax to consumers, especially if they are allowed to deduct the excise tax when calculating their federal income tax.

Allowing device manufacturers to write off the tax and pass along the cost, the letter says, would “permit a financial ‘double-dip’ that could leave device companies in a better financial position than before the [health law] was enacted.”

Asked if device manufacturers planned to increase the prices charged to hospitals and other consumers to make up for excise tax, an AdvaMed spokeswoman declined to answer. She instead referred to a comment by David Nexon, the association’s senior executive vice president: “Each AdvaMed member company will have to individually decide how to best deal with the damaging effects of the tax. For some, that might mean cutting R&D, reducing staff or other measures. Those are tough business decisions that will have to be made if this tax goes forward and go to the heart of why we opposed the tax in the first place.”

iWatch News is the investigative news report of the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit group focused on investigative journalism.

– Provided by Kaiser Health News.

View full post on All Stories

Washington, D.C., United States (AHN) – A congressional committee heard impassioned testimony Tuesday from farmers in California who are trying to hang on to their livelihoods while dealing with Environmental Protection Agency rules they describe as an economic burden.

The hearing was part of an “effort to identify and resolve regulatory impediments to job creation,” a committee staff member told All Headline News.

The Republican chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Darrell Issa of California, called some federal regulations “problematic” as the nation struggles with high unemployment.

“We know that the private sector is going to have to lead this nation’s economic recovery effort and it’s important for us to hear what is holding back efforts to create new jobs,” Issa said.

The nation’s unemployment rate stands at 8.8 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.

The hearing Tuesday is one of series of hearings the Oversight and Government Reform Committee is conducting with leaders of several industries on the impact of federal regulations.

The hearing in Salinas came during a rough week for the EPA.

On Monday, 170 members of Congress accused the agency of acting without congressional authority in expanding Clean Water Act regulations.

“In difficult economic times throughout our country, it is critical that we do not unilaterally make decisions that will disenfranchise farmers and American workers while we are making efforts necessary to protect clean water,” Rep. Tim Holden (D-Pa.) said in a letter to the EPA signed by the congressmen.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court heard a case in which attorneys for six states argued a federal court should have authority to order utilities to cut their greenhouse gas emissions, rather than leaving the regulation to the EPA.

During the hearing in Salinas, Calif., representatives of agricultural groups described farmers as becoming desperate during the economic recession of the past three years.

“American farmers are at crossroads,” said Tom Nassif, president of the Western Growers Association, in his testimony. “With a regulatory environment that is stifling job creation and economic opportunity, the majority of us must rely on off-farm income to support our families, an increasing number of us are moving our production off-shore, and some of us are simply shutting down our operations.”

Often, farmers and other industries have rules imposed on them “without the benefit of the best available science and experience, without public review of data and modeling and without serious stakeholder engagement,” Nassif said. “The resulting regulatory requirements are often inflexible and impractical.”

The hearing in Salinas follows a recent Oversight and Government Reform Committee report that found federal regulations fall harder on small businesses than large corporations.

The report said “small firms bear a regulatory cost of $10,585 per employee whereas large firms with more than 500 employees incur a cost of $7,755 per employee to comply with federal regulations.”

Even large industries are struggling under tough EPA regulations, the report said.

Utilities face 35 deadlines on emissions control between 2009 and 2017. Two utilities were forced to shut down after being unable to meet EPA regulatory standards.

Financial industry regulations are expected to reduce the industry’s economic growth by 4 percent, the report said.

“Uncertainty of future regulation chills capital formation and can leave U.S. businesses with less investment capital if the money is diverted to foreign markets,” the report said.

James Bogart, president of the Grower-Shippers Association of Central California, said the EPA often seeks to protect the environment without fully considering the economic consequences.

“It is vitally important from a public policy perspective to have EPA thoroughly explain the costs, as well as any potential benefits, of their proposed regulatory actions, before they take them,” Bogart said.

View full post on All Stories

New York, NY, United States (NewsBahn) – The founders of three of the largest Internet poker companies doing business in the United States are among 11 people accused Friday of bank fraud, money laundering, and illegal gambling offenses.

The charged were unveiled Friday when federal authorities unsealed a indictment in Manhattan.

The government also seeks at least $3 billion in civil money laundering penalties and forfeiture from the poker companies and the defendants. A federal district court has issued an order restraining approximately 76 bank accounts in 14 countries.

Five Internet domain names used by the poker companies also were seized.

Among those charged were Isai Scheinberg and Paul Tate of Poker Stars, Raymond Bitar and Nelson Burtnick of Full Tilt Poker and Scott Tom and Brent Buckley of Absolute Poker.

In a statement, Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bhahara said: “As charged, these defendants concocted an elaborate criminal fraud scheme, alternately tricking some U.S. banks and effectively bribing others to assure the continued flow of billions in illegal gambling profits. Moreover, as we allege, in their zeal to circumvent the gambling laws, the defendants also engaged in massive money laundering and bank fraud. Foreign firms that choose to operate in the United States are not free to flout the laws they don’t like simply because they can’t bear to be parted from their profits.”

The statement said owners of the poker sites “arranged for the money received from U.S. gamblers to be disguised as payments to hundreds of non-existent online merchants purporting to sell merchandise such as jewelry and golf balls. Of the billions of dollars in payment transactions that the poker companies tricked U.S. banks into processing, approximately one-third or more of the funds went directly to the Poker Companies as revenue through the ‘rake’ charged to players on almost every poker hand played online.”

After U.S. banks refused to accept payments from the gambling sites, which would have in violation of federal law, federal authorities said the companies persuaded a few small local banks in financial trouble to process their payments “in return for multi-million-dollar investments in the banks.”

John Campos, vice chairman of the board of a small private bank, SunFirst Bank of Saint George, UT, was among those charged in the indictment.

Four other men – Ryan Lang, Ira Rubin, Bradley Franzen and Chad Elie – were accused of being “highly compensated ‘payment processors’” who “lied to banks about the nature of the financial transactions they were processing, and covered up those lies, by, among things, creating phony corporations and websites to disguise payments.”

The indictment notes that in a press release dated Oct. 16, 2006, Absolute Poker announced that the company would continue its U.S. operations because “the U.S. Congress has no control over” the company’s payment transactions.

Two of the men were arrested Friday: Campos in Utah and Elie in Las Vegas. A third defendant, Franzen, is expected to appear in New York on Tuesday for arraignment. Bitar, Scheinberg, Burtnick, Tate, Tom, Beckley and Rubin are believe to be outside the U.S. and have not yet been arrested.

View full post on All Stories

Washington, D.C., United States (AHN) – President Barack Obama is scheduled to undertake domestic travel in the coming week according to a White House communique.

Obama is planning to hold town hall meetings in “Northern Virginia, Palo Alto, California and Reno, Nevada to speak directly to the American people about his vision for reducing our debt and bringing down our deficit, based on the values of shared responsibility and shared prosperity,” the White House said.

On the return flight from Chicago on Friday, Jay Carney, presidential spokesman called Obama’s two urgent tasks as one to pursue Congress to immediately raise the ceiling on U.S. debt and the other to move with urgency towards deficit reduction.

On the first task, Carney said, “That shouldn’t be linked or held hostage to any other action because the consequences of not raising the debt ceiling — those consequences would be catastrophic to the American economy, to the global economy and to America’s creditworthiness internationally.”

About efforts towards deficit reduction, Carney said the president, “asked the Vice President to oversee and leaders of Congress to appoint members to participate in where they can come together and begin to negotiate areas where we can agree to bring about further deficit reduction in a balanced way that can achieve the kind of results that we think are what America needs economically and for our future.”

Citing both as “urgent … but … not linked,” Carney reiterated, “With regards to the debt ceiling, it cannot be linked or held hostage to something that wouldn’t pass — couldn’t reach consensus. It has to be done. All the leaders of Congress of both parties have said that, and we obviously share that sentiment.”

Carney hinted that the president was ready for compromise on his targets while negotiating with Republicans, saying, “He recognizes he’s not going to get 100 percent of what he wants or that it’s not going to be his way only, and Republicans need to recognize that, which is how we ended up with an agreement last week on the funding for the 2011 budget.”

Carney noted that the president Obama believed Congressman Paul Ryan of the budget committee “is absolutely sincere and that he believes that this is the right — that that’s the right path, the one he put forward is the right path for America.”

On the disagreement part, Carney said, “He (Obama) doesn’t think that it’s (Ryan’s budget proposal) balanced.”

Explaining the disparities, Carney said, “He doesn’t think that we need to — that the price of deficit reduction needs to be ending the guarantee, the health benefits that Medicare has provided our seniors, cutting energy — clean energy investment by 70 percent, cutting education by 25 percent, cutting infrastructure by 30 percent — and all so that we can not just reduce the deficit but so that we can extend tax cuts for the wealthiest of Americans and give new tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.”

With the count-down to 2012 presidential election ticking and Obama already an official candidate, the incumbent needs to sell his policies to voters who are not diehard rock star Obama fans.

View full post on All Stories

Work environments emerge as a key challenge for Britons according to the inaugural findings from the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index in the United Kingdom. The U.K. significantly lags behind the U.S. in terms of workers’ perceptions of their workplaces, with repercussions for the nation’s wellbeing and economy.

View full post on Business Stories