September 02, 2009

Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid sent the following letter today to President Obama inviting him to address a Joint Session of Congress on Wednesday, September 9, 2009. Full release.

As we near Labor Day, a new nationwide poll finds that 88 percent of American workers are happy with their jobs. The survey, conducted by Clarus Research Group, found that only 6 percent of workers are unhappy with their current employment. Another 6 percent said they are neither happy nor unhappy. Full release

In the next several weeks, finance ministers from the G20 nations will convene in London in advance of the 2009 Pittsburgh Summit where the G20 heads of state will meet. The agendas for both meetings seek to find ways to correct the world economic crisis. As part of this effort, specific attention will be devoted to the credit crisis and possibly the urgent need for a globally accepted set of accounting standards (International Financial Reporting Standards - IFRS). Such standards would lead to greater international transparency and consistency in the ways in which companies around the world report performance. These standards would also help improve analysis of corporate performance by the investment community and creditors, among others. The United States has yet to adopt these standards, but is considering. Full release.

he violent crime rate in 2008 -- 19.3 victimizations per 1,000 persons age 12 or older -- was unchanged from the previous year, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) in the Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice, announced today. The property crime rate declined during 2008 from 147 to 135 crimes per 1,000 households, primarily as a result of decreases in theft and motor vehicle theft. Full release.

A survey of 4,387 workers in low-wage industries across the three largest U.S. cities - Chicago, Los Angeles and New York - found that the core workplace protections many Americans take for granted are failing significant numbers of workers. A report issued today and jointly funded by the Ford, Joyce, Haynes and Russell Sage Foundations examines the right to be paid at least the minimum wage, the right to be paid for overtime hours, the right to take meal breaks, access to workers' compensation when injured and the right to advocate for better working conditions. Full release.

The Center for Business Education at the Aspen Institute, in collaboration with the Foundation for Enterprise Development (FED) and the Employee Ownership Foundation (EOF), today announced Daphne Berry as the winner of the newly created 2009 Dissertation Proposal Award. This inaugural award for promising dissertation research in the realm of broad-based employee ownership is intended to identify innovative research and high-impact ideas about business and society focusing specifically on Shared Capitalism through Employee Ownership. Full release.

Millions of seniors will receive smaller Social Security checks next year, and none of the 37 million seniors who receive Social Security will get an increase, according to an August forecast from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). The CBO is also forecasting a zero COLA for 2011. Full release.

In the paper, The Boundless Carbon Cycle, published in the September issue of Nature Geoscience, scientists from the University of Vienna, Uppsala University in Sweden, University of Antwerp, and the U.S.-based Stroud(TM) Water Research Center argue that current international strategies to mitigate manmade carbon emissions and address climate change have overlooked a critical player - inland waters. Streams, rivers, lakes, reservoirs, and wetlands play an important role in the carbon cycle that is unaccounted for in conventional carbon cycling models. The commentary comes just months before COP15, the December 2009 UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen where representatives from 192 countries will gather to decide upon a 2012 climate agreement that will succeed the "Kyoto protocol." Full release.

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