Al Franken's Blog, page 63
June 11, 2013
CBS Minnesota: Sen. Al Franken On Cyber Security, Right To Privacy
One of the U.S. Senators at the forefront of cyber security issues is Minnesota’s Al Franken.
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© U.S. Senator Al Franken, Minnesota -- Official Campaign Website, 2013. |
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June 7, 2013
WDAZ 8: New farm bill clears Senate hurdle
A new Farm Bill is one step closer to passing. A vote by the US senate today sets up passage of the bill for next week. Senator Al Franken says the five year bill delivers the certainty Minnesota farmers need.
It saves the sugar program by rejecting amendments that would have reformed subsidies and import restrictions. Franken says it also creates energy jobs.
Franken: Talking about advanced bio fuels, wind, Minnesota leads in that technology.
The Senate Farm Bill will save 24 billion dollars from the federal deficit.
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© U.S. Senator Al Franken, Minnesota -- Official Campaign Website, 2013. |
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Star Tribune: Franken boosted by study of Obamacare premium limits
As Washington’s political class looks warily toward the implementation of Obamacare during the 2014 election year, a little-known piece of the law backed by U.S. Sen. Al Franken has saved consumers in the individual market an estimated $2.1 billion, according to a new analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation.
The report, which was hailed by the Minnesota Democrat’s office Thursday, shows how the so-called medical loss ratio implemented in 2011 has reduced insurers’ administrative costs and profits by requiring them to issue rebates if they fail to spend a certain amount of premium dollars on health care expenses.
The savings include some $241 million in rebates that insurers estimate they will pay to customers in the individual market this year based on their performance in 2012.
The rule requires insurers to spend at least 80 cents of every premium dollar on medical care. The proportion insurers must spend goes up to 85 cents for policies sold to large employers.
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© U.S. Senator Al Franken, Minnesota -- Official Campaign Website, 2013. |
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June 5, 2013
Winona Daily News: Franken bill aims to protect bullied LGBT students
U.S. Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., reintroduced a bill Tuesday to strengthen bullying protections for LGBT students.
The Student Non-Discrimination Act would aim to protect lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender students from harassment, discrimination and violence at school. It has 30 co-sponsors, including U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., and has been added to a broader education bill also introduced Tuesday, according to a release from Franken’s office.
“No child should dread going to school because they don’t feel safe,” Franken said in a statement. “My proposal extends these protections to our gay and lesbian students who shouldn’t ever feel afraid of going to school.”
© U.S. Senator Al Franken, Minnesota -- Official Campaign Website, 2013. |
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May 31, 2013
MPR: Analyst sees confidence behind Minnesota student borrowing
An analyst in Minnesota’s Office of Higher Education sees both good news and bad in recently released numbers about student debt.
After Washington, D.C., Minnesota has the highest concentration of student-loan debt in the country. More than 22 percent of Minnesotans carry some amount of student debt. And Alex Friedrich of MPR News reports that the average debt accumulated by each Minnesota student is $29,800 — almost $5,000 more than the national average.
“Even though Minnesota students borrow more than the national average,” said Tricia Grimes, “they have lower default rates.”
Grimes, a policy and research analyst, said those numbers may mean that Minnesota students are optimistic about their prospects. “One theory is that Minnesotans are borrowing more because they are fairly confident they can get jobs and be able to repay the loans,” she said.
She pointed out that unemployment is 2 points lower in Minnesota than the rest of the country, and that Minnesota is among the states with the highest percentage of population in the workforce.
Even so, she said, students here and elsewhere are being forced into debt by college costs.
“Tuition has gone up three times the rate of inflation in the last decade,” Grimes said. “It’s actually gone up faster than health-care costs. Family incomes have not gone up anywhere near that fast.” Pell grants and other kinds of aid are not enough to help students avoid debt, she said.
© U.S. Senator Al Franken, Minnesota -- Official Campaign Website, 2013. |
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May 30, 2013
Denver Post: Seven facts you won’t believe about U.S. Senators
Senators aren’t as boring as you might think. In fact, sometimes they are quite interesting.
Here are seven facts about U.S. senators you won’t believe.
Al Franken, cartographer
Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., can draw a detailed map of the United States from memory. In fact, it’s kind of a regular thing for him.
© U.S. Senator Al Franken, Minnesota -- Official Campaign Website, 2013. |
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AgriNews: Senate keeps sugar provisions in farm bill
The Senate voted 54-45 on May 22 to keep the sugar provisions in the farm bill intact.
Sens. Jeanne Shaheen, Mark Kirk and Patrick Toomey introduced an amendment to reform the U.S. sugar program. The bill, as written, calls for the sugar program to continue unchanged through 2017.
Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., told reporters on a May 23 conference call that he and a team of other senators worked hard to keep the sugar language in the bill and he was pleased by the outcome.
“The U.S. sugar program is critical to Minnesota’s sugar growers and to growers across the nation,” Franken said.
According to a North Dakota State University study, the sugar beet industry creates 2,500 jobs in Minnesota and North Dakota and it indirectly supports 19,000 additional full-time jobs in the states.
The sugar beet industry has an almost $5 billion economic impact on the Red River Valley region, said Nick Sinner, executive director of the Red River Valley Sugarbeet Growers Association. Sinner joined Franken on the conference call.
© U.S. Senator Al Franken, Minnesota -- Official Campaign Website, 2013. |
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May 24, 2013
MPR: US Senate rejects end to sugar industry aid
The U.S. Senate defeated an amendment to the farm bill that would have ended government protections for the domestic sugar industry, including Minnesota sugar beet growers.
Those protections include import restrictions on foreign sugar and price supports for domestic growers. Backed by the candy industry and food processors, supporters of the amendment argued that ending the sugar program would lower the cost of sugar for American consumers.
But both of Minnesota’s Democratic Senators voted against the amendment. Sen. Al Franken said ending the program wouldn’t lower costs, and would cost the country jobs.
“Removing the protections that we have for our domestic sugar producers will do nothing but kill an American industry and outsource jobs to other countries, to our competitors,” Franken said.
© U.S. Senator Al Franken, Minnesota -- Official Campaign Website, 2013. |
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Star Tribune: SEC should adopt Franken plan on credit ratings agencies
A sensible, bipartisan solution to the conflicts of interest that too often arise between credit ratings agencies and the firms that hire them to judge their products should be adopted by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The reform, championed by Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., and Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., is the result of an amendment to the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial-reform legislation. The amendment triggered a two-year study that requires the SEC to act if it determines that it is “necessary or appropriate in the public interest or for the protection of investors.”
This was the issue at hand at a May 14 Credit Ratings Roundtable convened by the SEC. Franken appealed directly for a plan that would create an independent, SEC-appointed board that would assign which ratings agency would calculate the risk of financial products.
Currently, sellers of financial products hire their own ratings agencies. This can create a conflict of interest, because agencies have an incentive to signal that they will assign a high rating to win the business.
“The analogy I like to use is if a figure skater paid the judges to give her a ‘10’ every time,” Franken told an editorial writer.
At the roundtable, Franken used a regional example that connected Wall Street to Main Street. “A pension manager making investments for the pension funds of volunteer firefighters in Kandiyohi County in central Minnesota simply doesn’t have the resources to do his or her own credit risk analysis,” he told commissioners.
Those agencies with the resources — like Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s, and Fitch, the three firms that dominate the market — are resisting changing a system that has brought them benefits.
“The [Franken] proposed system could create new conflicts, be costly, slow to implement and cause uncertainty to the marketplace,” Douglas Peterson, president of Standard & Poor’s, said at the roundtable. “We believe that a government-run assignment system is not the best way forward.”
The Franken-Wicker proposal is imperfect, but it would improve on the status quo. And in doing so it would not jettison the financial industry’s infrastructure. Rather, it would create a mechanism to avoid so-called “ratings shopping” that can result in high ratings for substandard investments — in some cases, “junk,” according to Franken…
The house of cards created by AAA evaluations for subprime mortgage-backed securities finally imploded during the 2008 financial crisis. Those harrowing days became the much longer era now known as the Great Recession. Most Minnesotans, including Franken, don’t need to be reminded of the impact. Many saw their lives upended due to collapsed portfolios or sudden recession-related joblessness. Some are still struggling to put their financial, professional and personal lives back together.
The individual setbacks became collective. Busted budgets on the federal, state and local levels led to deeper deficits or reduced services. Or, in many cases, both.
Memories seem conveniently shorter on Wall Street. But the recent run-up in equities markets should not preclude the systemic reforms needed to avoid the mistakes of the past.
© U.S. Senator Al Franken, Minnesota -- Official Campaign Website, 2013. |
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May 22, 2013
Mankato Free Press: Our View: SEC should act on ratings conflicts
Money talks. In the continuing dispute over the all-too-cozy relationship between the people who create and sell financial products and the people who rate their risk, the money says: Shut up and let us do what we want.
Minnesota Sen. Al Franken and Mississippi Sen. Roger Wicker — the first a Democrat, the second a Republican — are pushing the Securities and Exchange Commission to act on the myriad conflicts of interest in the ratings process. Specifically, they want the SEC to create a commission that would name the agencies that rate such investments as mortgage-backed securities.
The credit raters don’t want to eliminate the conflicts. Nor do the banks and brokerages. They want to continue to have the people who create the packages of debt they intend to sell select their own raters, an arrangement that encourages the raters to rubber stamp pretty much everything as a AAA investment.
There is no incentive for a rater to conclude that a specific package is anything less than high-grade; do that, and the creator will simply find another rater who’ll be more accommodating.
That arrangement led during flash times to a sea of debt that was far more risky than anybody on the outside of the process realized — and whose massive collective failure underlay the financial meltdown of 2008 that created the Great Recession.
© U.S. Senator Al Franken, Minnesota -- Official Campaign Website, 2013. |
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