Robert Reich Strongly Reminds Us And the President What the U.S. Economy Really Needs

(Image: JR / t r u t h o u t)

http://www.truth-out.org/zero-economy/1315143274

All,

I and many others said all this and more a couple days ago. But it certainly bears repeating over and over again until SOMEBODY actually listens and ACTS on what it means...Acclaimed economist, Professor at UC, Berkeley, and former Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration Robert Reich reminds us in crystal clear language what we all need to know and do about the national economy at this point in history...

Kofi


The Zero Economy
4 September 2011
by Robert Reich
Robert Reich's Blog | Op-Ed


The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday no jobs were created in August. Zero. Nada.

Well, not quite. The strike at Verizon reduced the labor force by 45,000. Minnesota government employees returned to work, adding 22,000. So in reality, America added 23,000 jobs. Almost zero.

In reality, worse than zero. We need 125,000 a month merely to keep up with population growth. So the hole continues to deepen.

Since this Depression began at the end of 2007, America’s potential labor force – working-age people who want jobs – has grown by over 7 million. But since then the number of Americans with jobs has shrunk by more than 300,000.

If this doesn’t prompt President Obama to unveil a bold jobs plan next Thursday, I don’t know what will.

The problem is on the demand side. Consumers (whose spending is 70 percent of the economy) can’t boost the economy on their own. They’re still too burdened by debt, especially on homes that are worth less than their mortgages. Their jobs are disappearinig, their pay is dropping, their medical bills are soaring.

And businesses won’t hire without more sales.

So we’re in a vicous cycle.

Republicans continue to claim businesses aren’t hiring because they’re uncertain about regulatory costs. Or they can’t find the skilled workers they need.

Baloney. If these were the reasons businesses weren’t hiring – and demand were growing – you’d expect companies to make more use of their current employees. The length of the average workweek would be increasing.

But the length of the average workweek has been dropping. In August it declined for the third month in a row, to 34.2 hours. That’s back to where it was at the start of the year – barely longer than what it was at its shortest point two years ago (33.7 hours in June 2009).

It’s demand, stupid.

So what does a sane nation do when the consumers and businesses can’t boost the economy on their own?

Government becomes the purchaser of last resort. It hires directly (a new WPA and Civilian Conservation Corps, for example). It helps states and locales, so they don’t have to continue to slash payrolls and public services. (The help could be structured as a loan, to be repaid when unemployment drops to, say, 6 percent.)

And it hires indirectly — contracting with companies to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure, including school buildings, to take another example.

Not only does this create jobs but also puts money in the hands of all the people who get the jobs, so they can turn around and buy the goods and services they need – generating more jobs.

Get it? Not exactly rocket science.

So why don’t Republicans get it? Either they’re knaves – they want the economy to stay awful through next Election Day so Obama gets the boot. Or they’re fools – they’ve bought the lie that reducing the deficit now creates more jobs.

Every time you hear anyone say we’re “broke” or “can’t afford to spend more,” tell them we’ll be in worse shape if we don’t. If the economy remains dead in the water, the ratio of public debt to GDP balloons.

And remind them that the federal government can now borrow at fire-sale rates. Interest on the ten-year Treasury bill is 2 percent.

Do you hear me, Mr. President? Please — be bold next week. And if, as expected, Republicans refuse to go along, take it to the people. Mobilize the public. Use the bully pulpit. That’s what you have it for.

One more thing, Mr. President. You also have to tackle inequality. When so much income and wealth continues to flow to the very top, America’s vast middle class still won’t have enough purchasing power to boost the economy. Priming the pump is necessary but won’t be sufficient without enough water in the well.

The Insidious Role of the Koch Brothers and Other Wealthy Capitalists in Attacking and Trying to Destroy Public Sector Unions

Left, Robert Caplin For The New York Times; Dave Williams/Wichita Eagle, via Associated Press
David H. Koch, left, and Charles G. Koch have long used their wallets to promote fiscal conservatism and combat regulation.

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Paul Krugman

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/opinion/21krugman.html?_r=1&emc=eta1

All,

Once again Paul Krugman eloquently identifies what's really at stake in the current pitched battle between the public employee unions and the new draconian Republican governor in Wisconsin (and by extension the fights taking place in over 40 other states in the country who are also currently facing massive budget crises). If only the President and the inept and opportunist Democratic Party generally had the political courage, intellectual clarity, ideological insight, and simple bedrock commitment to real social and economic change on behalf of the masses of the poor and workingclass people in this country that Krugman has. But that's like wishing for the sun to come out at night at this point...

Kofi


OP-ED COLUMNIST
Wisconsin Power Play
By PAUL KRUGMAN
February 20, 2011
New York Times

Last week, in the face of protest demonstrations against Wisconsin’s new union-busting governor, Scott Walker — demonstrations that continued through the weekend, with huge crowds on Saturday — Representative Paul Ryan made an unintentionally apt comparison: “It’s like Cairo has moved to Madison.”

It wasn’t the smartest thing for Mr. Ryan to say, since he probably didn’t mean to compare Mr. Walker, a fellow Republican, to Hosni Mubarak. Or maybe he did — after all, quite a few prominent conservatives, including Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Rick Santorum, denounced the uprising in Egypt and insist that President Obama should have helped the Mubarak regime suppress it.

In any case, however, Mr. Ryan was more right than he knew. For what’s happening in Wisconsin isn’t about the state budget, despite Mr. Walker’s pretense that he’s just trying to be fiscally responsible. It is, instead, about power. What Mr. Walker and his backers are trying to do is to make Wisconsin — and eventually, America — less of a functioning democracy and more of a third-world-style oligarchy. And that’s why anyone who believes that we need some counterweight to the political power of big money should be on the demonstrators’ side.

Some background: Wisconsin is indeed facing a budget crunch, although its difficulties are less severe than those facing many other states. Revenue has fallen in the face of a weak economy, while stimulus funds, which helped close the gap in 2009 and 2010, have faded away.

In this situation, it makes sense to call for shared sacrifice, including monetary concessions from state workers. And union leaders have signaled that they are, in fact, willing to make such concessions.

But Mr. Walker isn’t interested in making a deal. Partly that’s because he doesn’t want to share the sacrifice: even as he proclaims that Wisconsin faces a terrible fiscal crisis, he has been pushing through tax cuts that make the deficit worse. Mainly, however, he has made it clear that rather than bargaining with workers, he wants to end workers’ ability to bargain.

The bill that has inspired the demonstrations would strip away collective bargaining rights for many of the state’s workers, in effect busting public-employee unions. Tellingly, some workers — namely, those who tend to be Republican-leaning — are exempted from the ban; it’s as if Mr. Walker were flaunting the political nature of his actions.

Why bust the unions? As I said, it has nothing to do with helping Wisconsin deal with its current fiscal crisis. Nor is it likely to help the state’s budget prospects even in the long run: contrary to what you may have heard, public-sector workers in Wisconsin and elsewhere are paid somewhat less than private-sector workers with comparable qualifications, so there’s not much room for further pay squeezes.

So it’s not about the budget; it’s about the power.

In principle, every American citizen has an equal say in our political process. In practice, of course, some of us are more equal than others. Billionaires can field armies of lobbyists; they can finance think tanks that put the desired spin on policy issues; they can funnel cash to politicians with sympathetic views (as the Koch brothers did in the case of Mr. Walker). On paper, we’re a one-person-one-vote nation; in reality, we’re more than a bit of an oligarchy, in which a handful of wealthy people dominate.

Given this reality, it’s important to have institutions that can act as counterweights to the power of big money. And unions are among the most important of these institutions.

You don’t have to love unions, you don’t have to believe that their policy positions are always right, to recognize that they’re among the few influential players in our political system representing the interests of middle- and working-class Americans, as opposed to the wealthy. Indeed, if America has become more oligarchic and less democratic over the last 30 years — which it has — that’s to an important extent due to the decline of private-sector unions.

And now Mr. Walker and his backers are trying to get rid of public-sector unions, too.

There’s a bitter irony here. The fiscal crisis in Wisconsin, as in other states, was largely caused by the increasing power of America’s oligarchy. After all, it was superwealthy players, not the general public, who pushed for financial deregulation and thereby set the stage for the economic crisis of 2008-9, a crisis whose aftermath is the main reason for the current budget crunch. And now the political right is trying to exploit that very crisis, using it to remove one of the few remaining checks on oligarchic influence.

So will the attack on unions succeed? I don’t know. But anyone who cares about retaining government of the people by the people should hope that it doesn’t.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/22/us/22koch.html?src=me&ref=general


Billionaire Brothers’ Money Plays Role in Wisconsin Dispute
By ERIC LIPTON
February 21, 2011
New York Times

WASHINGTON — Among the thousands of demonstrators who jammed the Wisconsin State Capitol grounds this weekend was a well-financed advocate from Washington who was there to voice praise for cutting state spending by slashing union benefits and bargaining rights.

The visitor, Tim Phillips, the president of Americans for Prosperity, told a large group of counterprotesters who had gathered Saturday at one edge of what otherwise was a mostly union crowd that the cuts were not only necessary, but they also represented the start of a much-needed nationwide move to slash public-sector union benefits.

“We are going to bring fiscal sanity back to this great nation,” he said.

What Mr. Phillips did not mention was that his Virginia-based nonprofit group, whose budget surged to $40 million in 2010 from $7 million three years ago, was created and financed in part by the secretive billionaire brothers Charles G. and David H. Koch.

State records also show that Koch Industries, their energy and consumer products conglomerate based in Wichita, Kan., was one of the biggest contributors to the election campaign of Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, a Republican who has championed the proposed cuts.

Even before the new governor was sworn in last month, executives from the Koch-backed group had worked behind the scenes to try to encourage a union showdown, Mr. Phillips said in an interview on Monday.

State governments have gone into the red, he said, in part because of the excessively generous pay and benefits that unions have been able to negotiate for teachers, police, firefighters and other state and local employees.

“We thought it was important to do,” Mr. Phillips said, adding that his group is already working with activists and state officials in Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania to urge them to take similar steps to curtail union benefits or give public employees the power to opt out of unions entirely.

To union leaders and liberal activists in Washington, this intervention in Wisconsin is proof of the expanding role played by nonprofit groups with murky ties to wealthy corporate executives as they push a decidedly conservative agenda.

“The Koch brothers are the poster children of the effort by multinational corporate America to try to redefine the rights and values of American citizens,” said Representative Gwen Moore, Democrat of Wisconsin, who joined with others in the union protests.

A spokesman for Koch Industries, as well as Mr. Phillips, scoffed at that accusation. The companies owned by Koch (pronounced Coke) — which include the Georgia-Pacific Corporation and the Koch Pipeline Company — have no direct stake in the union debate, they said. The company has about 3,000 employees in Wisconsin, including workers at a toilet paper factory and gasoline supply terminals. The pending legislation would not directly affect its bottom line.

“A balanced budget will benefit Koch Industries and its thousands of employees in Wisconsin no more and no less than the rest of the state’s private-sector workers and employers,” said Jeff Schoepke, a Koch Industries lobbyist in Wisconsin. “This is a dispute between public-sector unions and democratically elected officials over how best to serve the public interest.”

Certainly, the Koch brothers have long used their wallets to promote fiscal conservatism and combat regulation, another Koch Industries spokesman said Monday.

But the push to curtail union benefits in Wisconsin has been backed by many conservative groups that have no Koch connection, Mr. Phillips noted.

Americans for Prosperity came to Wisconsin more than five years ago and has thousands of members, he said. The state chapter organized buses on Saturday for hundreds of Wisconsin residents to go to the Capitol to support the governor’s proposals.

“This is a Wisconsin movement,” said Fred Luber, chief executive of the Supersteel Products Corporation in Milwaukee, who serves on Americans for Prosperity’s Wisconsin state advisory board. “Obviously, Washington is interested in this. But it is up to us to do.”

Political activism is high on the list of priorities for Charles Koch, who in a letter last September to other business leaders and conservatives explained that he saw no other choice.

“If not us, who? If not now, when?” said the letter, which invited other conservatives to a retreat in January in Rancho Mirage, Calif. “It is up to us to combat what is now the greatest assault on American freedom and prosperity in our lifetimes.”

Campaign finance records in Washington show that donations by Koch Industries and its employees climbed to a total of $2 million in the last election cycle, twice as much as a decade ago, with 92 percent of that money going to Republicans. Donations in state government races — like in Wisconsin — have also surged in recent years, records show.

But the most aggressive expansion of the Koch brothers’ effort to influence public policy has come through the Americans for Prosperity, which runs both a charitable foundation and a grass-roots-activists group. Mr. Phillips serves as president of both branches, and David Koch is chairman of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation.

The grass-roots-activists wing of the organization today has chapters in 32 states, including Wisconsin, and an e-mail list of 1.6 million supporters, said Mary Ellen Burke, a spokeswoman. She would not say how much of last year’s $40 million budget came from the Koch family, but nationwide donations have come in from 70,000 members, she said, offering it as proof that it has wide support.

The organization has taken up a range of topics, including combating the health care law, environmental regulations and spending by state and federal governments. The effort to impose limits on public labor unions has been a particular focus in Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, all states with Republican governors, Mr. Phillips said, adding that he expects new proposals to emerge soon in some of those states to limit union power.

To Bob Edgar, a former House Democrat who is now president of Common Cause, a liberal group that has been critical of what it sees as the rising influence of corporate interests in American politics, the Koch brothers are using their money to create a façade of grass-roots support for their favorite causes.

“This is a dangerous moment in America history,” Mr. Edgar said. “It is not that these folks don’t have a right to participate in politics. But they are moving democracy into the control of more wealthy corporate hands.”

During a demonstration outside the Wisconsin Capitol Monday, one protester made a similar point, holding a sign saying: “Gov. Walker: Kick the Koch Habit.”

But Mr. Phillips and members of his group and other conservative activists, not surprisingly, see it very differently.

Just as unions organize to fight for their priorities, conservatives are entitled to a voice of their own.

“This is a watershed moment in Wisconsin,” Mr. Phillips said. “For the last two decades, government unions have used their power to drive pensions and benefits and salaries well beyond anything that can be sustained. We are just trying to change that.”






Steven Greenhouse contributed reporting from Madison, Wis.

Whose Side Are You On Mr. President?

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/18/politics-of-wisconsin-labor-fight-spread-to-washington/?nl=us&emc=politicsemailema1

All,

Please LEAD for once Mr. President and aggressively stand up to your and most importantly OUR many vile enemies in the government and the general economy...We really need you to show some genuine FIGHT for a change...As always the question is and must remain: Whose Side Are You On?

Kofi




Politics of Wisconsin Labor Fight Spread to Washington
By MICHAEL D. SHEAR
February 18, 2011
New York Times

President Obama and his political rivals in Washington have jumped into the epic battle in Wisconsin between organized labor and the state’s newly elected Republican governor over the rights and benefits of state workers.

Efforts by Scott Walker, the state’s Republican governor, to slash collective-bargaining rights of public employees prompted days of protests at the state capitol by thousands of union workers, fueled and organized in part by Mr. Obama’s own political apparatus in Washington.

Even as Democratic lawmakers in Wisconsin fled their own state in an attempt to stall a vote in the Republican-controlled state senate, Mr. Obama decried the tactics of Mr. Walker as “an assault on unions.”

That prompted House Speaker John Boehner to rip into Mr. Obama, accusing him of having “unleashed the Democratic National Committee to spread disinformation and confusion in Wisconsin.”

Mr. Boehner, in a statement, praised Mr. Walker and other Republican governors for making the tough decisions to cut spending. And he chided the president for siding with the wrong side in the contentious Wisconsin debate.

“Rather than shouting down those in office who speak honestly about the challenges we face, the president and his advisers should lead. Until they do, they are not focusing on jobs, and they are not listening to the American people who put them in power.”

The sharp-edged retorts from Mr. Obama and Mr. Boehner reflect the broader debate in the nation’s capital as Democrats and Republicans dig in to rigid positions about spending, investment, the deficit and changes to entitlement programs.

In the next two weeks, Democrats and Republicans in Washington are set to play a game of chicken with the federal budget. The government’s authority to spend money runs out on March 4 and could force a shutdown in federal services unless the parties can agree on a new spending plan.

But despite recent calls for bipartisanship and promises to work together in Washington, the standoff in Wisconsin is a preview of how easily discussions could disintegrate into chaos.

For Mr. Boehner, the Wisconsin debate is another opportunity to preach a message of fiscal restraint in the face of demanding unions and government employees. Republican governors in several states, including Wisconsin, have said they must make drastic cuts to deal with huge budget problems.

By jumping quickly to condemn Mr. Obama’s comments, Mr. Boehner explicitly questioned the president’s leadership, suggesting he is unwilling to make the deep sacrifices necessary to put the country on the right fiscal path.

Other Republicans, too, see opportunity in the imagery coming out of Wisconsin. Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, who is trying to head off a primary challenge from the Tea Party in his state, praised Mr. Walker and other Republican governors for making “tough choices” in their budgets.

“It is too bad that Washington Democrats are attacking them rather than following their lead,” Mr. Hatch said on Thursday. “President Obama’s comments today were, frankly, way off base. The only assault is from a bunch of self-interested government union employees who are putting their interests ahead of the interests of the Wisconsin taxpayers who have been funding their runaway spending.”

He added: “This is not the way public servants should behave.”

Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the Republican chairman of the budget committee in the House, said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that “It’s like Cairo has moved to Madison these days.”

For Mr. Obama and the Democrats, the Wisconsin debate provides an opportunity to stand by their supporters in organized labor in a part of the country that is likely to be an important battleground during the 2012 presidential election campaign.

It also allows Democrats to once again raise questions about Mr. Boehner’s willingness to see government jobs lost.

This week, Democrats seized on Mr. Boehner’s comment that if government jobs were lost because of the cuts that Republicans are calling for, then “so be it.” Democrats now view the situation in Wisconsin as another example of Mr. Boehner taking sides against workers.

Former Representative David Obey of Wisconsin on Thursday accused Mr. Walker of acting like Hosni Mubarak, the deposed president of Egypt, as protestors marched in the streets of Cairo.

“I think what Gov. Walker is trying to do amounts to political thuggery,” Mr. Obey told Talking Points Memo. “It is one thing to say that these are tough times — everybody’s got to cut back and public employees are going to have to take cuts like the rest of us … but he’s using it as an excuse to gut the ability of workers to organize and bargain collectively. In my view that’s outrageous.”

A spokesman for the Democratic National Committee declined to respond to Mr. Boehner’s accusation of spreading disinformation. But officials confirmed that Organizing for America, an arm of the party, has been “quietly, but significantly, involved in
building grassroots energy and organizing protests.”

The political efforts on behalf of the union workers in Wisconsin were undertaken at the direction of Tim Kaine, the D.N.C. chairman, according to officials at the party.

In addition to helping build crowds for two rallies in Madison this week, O.F.A. organized 15 “rapid-response phone banks” aimed at getting supporters to call state lawmakers. The effort covered 10 cities in Wisconsin, officials said.

Volunteer leaders of O.F.A. helped organize the rallies and youth leaders at college campuses brought buses to help transport people. Another O.F.A. program sought to get letters published in 23 targeted newspapers in Wisconsin. O.F.A. also used blogs, Facebook, Twitter and e-mail messages to rally opposition to Mr. Walker’s efforts.

Mr. Boehner, in his comments Thursday, said Mr. Obama should call a stop to those efforts.

“I urge the president to order the D.N.C. to suspend these tactics,” Mr. Boehner said. “This is not the way you begin an ‘adult conversation’ in America about solutions to the fiscal challenges that are destroying jobs in our country.”

The Class War in the United States is Real and Wall Street, the Banks, and the Corporate World Are Leading the Attack!

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0211/49783.html

All,

To all those who foolishly and naively think that we are not smack dab in the middle --as always!--of a vicious Class War in the United States--Read this...

Kofi


GOP tries to slash Wall Street law
By Meredith Shiner
February 18, 2011
Politico

The federal agencies charged with enforcing last year’s Wall Street reform law are starving for money, short staffed and worried about being able to implement the far-reaching crackdown on the financial industry.

And that’s exactly what top Republicans in charge of banking and Wall Street oversight want.

As top key administration officials appeared before the Senate banking committee on Thursday to plead for more money to enforce the so-called Dodd-Frank act, Republicans admitted that they were aiming to dismantle and defund the law.

“We should slow a lot of that down,” said Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby, the top Republican on the panel. “A lot of us voted against and oppose Dodd-Frank. Obviously, we’d repeal it. So I certainly don’t think we should rush to implement it.”

When asked whether taking down funding levels is a “legitimate” way to slow the process of implementation, Shelby responded: “Always.”

The stalled continuing resolution bill being debated in the House is threatening funding for the financial reform law, and agencies need more money by a July deadline if they’re going to start enforcing a wide range of new rules.

But there’s a risk for Shelby and other Republicans who want to break up the Wall Street law — financial reform didn’t rattle voters the same way the health debate did. The GOP will have a tougher case to make against Dodd-Frank while still appearing sensitive to the causes of the 2008 financial meltdown and its residual effects.

Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) warned Thursday that failure to fund the reform law will be “a step backwards, and it is a dangerous step for the American economy.”

But at the rate Congress is going on the fiscal 2011 continuing resolution, Shelby’s hoped-for “slowdown” is more of a possibility than the law’s most vocal Democratic supporters would like to admit.

The two agencies hit hardest by the failure to pass a full 2011 budget are the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Both the SEC and the CFTC — which were given a substantial increase in power by the regulatory reform law — were slated to get significant funding bumps this year. The chiefs of both agencies said Thursday they don’t have the resources for day-to-day operations, let alone enough manpower to deal with the workload of implementing the sweeping overhaul.

The president called for the SEC budget to grow from $1.1 billion to $1.4 billion in fiscal 2012 and asked for an allocation of $308 million for the much smaller CFTC, up from the agency’s $168 million budget prior to the passage of the Wall Street reform bill.

House Republicans cut funding levels for both agencies, however, slashing $56.8 million from the CFTC and $25 million from the SEC. Republicans have also called for the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — perhaps their least favorite part of the law — to receive $80 million, a significant cut from the $143 million the agency had hoped for.

SEC Chairwoman Mary Schapiro told senators that the agency doesn’t “have the capacity” currently to take on the additional responsibilities required by Dodd-Frank.

“With respect to our current core functions, we are feeling the pressure of the continuing resolution,” Schapiro said. “In order to operationalize any of the rules we are writing, we will need more funds.”

CFTC Chairman Gary Gensler had an even more dire outlook.

“If [the CFTC] were to return to the 2008 levels, we wouldn’t be able to fulfill our statutory mission,” Gensler said.



But none of these concerns seemed to rattle Republicans, who didn’t seem troubled by the problems the government might have enforcing the Dodd-Frank law.

In the hearing’s most telling moment, Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker asked the Obama officials whether it would “make sense” for Congress to try to slow down regulators who admitted they are under duress because of budgetary constraints.

“I’ve heard from a number of them about the problems they’re having because of funding,” Corker said after the hearing. “You don’t have the staff you need. A lot of people are concerned about how rapidly these regulations are being created and how much real thought is going into them, so might it make sense, because of the budgetary issues our country is dealing with and them directly, might it make sense just to slow the process down so they’re not rushing through implementing things that could create?”

But Democrats, who still staunchly defend the law they passed on mostly a party-line vote, aren’t buying the move and vow to fight for funding.

New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez told the banking committee Thursday he is concerned that if Democrats allow funding for the agencies to dry up, passing Dodd-Frank will amount to a “hollow promise to the American people of what we said we were going to do.”

And Durbin, who chairs the appropriations subcommittee that oversees the SEC and CFTC, was even more emphatic in his message to Republicans.

“We’ve got to do everything in our power to make sure they have the resources. I have the SEC and the CFTC in my appropriations subcommittee,” Durbin said. “What Speaker [John] Boehner and House Republicans want to do will devastate their current responsibilities, and they’ll be unable to even get close to the responsibilities under Dodd-Frank.”

Underneath the rhetoric for and against the law from both parties is the reality of the budget fight on the Hill. The temporary funding resolution passed last December, which did not include funds to support Dodd-Frank, is set to expire in March. House Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) told reporters Wednesday he’s already dispatched Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) to work on another temporary measure.

Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), one of the Wall Street law’s namesakes, introduced an amendment to the House funding resolution that would increase SEC funding by offsetting it with funds transferred from the treasury. Though the House was slated to vote on the amendment Thursday, it’s unlikely to have an impact, as the reform law is unpopular with the GOP majority and Obama already has promised to veto the House version of the bill.

Despite the tricky legislative logistics, fighting for the Wall Street reform law could still give Democrats space for a political victory. The measure is significantly more popular than its health care counterpart, and the specter of a market crash that continues to affect Main Street economy still looms.

“We’re going to try to make the argument that, without a robust regulatory scheme, we’d be in danger again of another fiscal crisis,” Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), a top member of the banking committee, told POLITICO. “To keep what we did under the Bush administration — to deregulate by defunding — could lead us exactly back to the crisis we saw in ’08 and ’09 and particularly now in a much different marketplace.”


© 2011 Capitol News Company, LLC

Tavis Smiley Hosts Important Political Forum at George Washington University--"America's Next Chapter"

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/11996130#utm_campaigne=synclickback&source=http://www.americasnextchapter.com/watchlive.html&medium=11996130

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/11996130

All,

This fascinating and very important three hour long panel discussion at George Washington University on January 13, 2011 was hosted and moderated by Tavis Smiley of PBS and featured a number of American intellectuals, journalists, scholars, political activists, and media pundits that includes a wide range of individuals from the left and right of the ideological spectrum with everyone from Dr. Cornel West-- who is magnificently lucid and is particularly on point in this forum--to other significant contributions by Arianna Huffington, David Frum, Dana Milbank, Maria Teresa Kumar, Maria Bartiromo, John Chen, and David Brody. Smiley and the various participants in this public forum are to be highly commended for a truly dynamic, contentious, HONEST, INFORMATIVE, and critically engaging discussion of the REAL issues facing the entire country and the ongoing series of very serious crises that President Obama, the larger Democratic Party, the right wing Republicans AND the general American Left are for the most part all equally responsible for not properly addressing and dealing with (whether we like it or agree with that assessment or not). Please check out the video link to the forum above and pass it on...

Kofi

Facing the Reality of Political Warfare in 2011--And Why It's Important

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/04/opinion/04herbert.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha212

All,

The demagogic thugs, bullies, and gangsters who run and control the Republican Party are as usual out to destroy us all in the name and at the behest of the super wealthy elites and are more determined than ever that structural and institutional forms of racism, sexism, homophobia, militarism, and corporate domination rule the country with an iron fist. All these venal politicians need to succeed is electoral complicity and consensus by millions of reactionary, braindead, and largely bigoted and predominately white American poor, working, and middle class citizens who wouldn't know how to vote in their own objective political and economic self interest if their lives depended on it--- which tragically and not so ironically enough it actually does. So the real challenge for the many millions of the rest of us who don't subscribe to or support the blatant greed, hatred, mendacity, authoritarianism, and hypocrisy of the Right is to not cave in to and be shamelessly intimidated by these political cretins and their economic/ideological sponsors and benefactors. What that is going to require from us more than anything from this point on is real courage, commitment, and a sustained, well organized tenacity and insistence on an alternative vision that will systematically DEMAND of ourselves, the President, and Congress that we not be assaulted, exploited, defamed and openly subjected to contempt, ridicule, condescension, and abandonment by our government and other major social, cultural, and economic institutions. In other words: This is WAR and anyone who thinks that the phantoms and delusions of "bipartisanship" and unilateral "compromise" (read: abject submission) is not only fooling themselves but are ensuring that the Republican rightwing agenda will ultimately triumph in 2011 and far beyond on a massive scale that will make what the deadly criminals of the Bushwhacker regime did from 2000-2008 look like--dare I say it!--a mere tea party...

Kofi


OP-ED COLUMNIST

Get Ready for a G.O.P. Rerun
By BOB HERBERT
January 3, 2011
New York Times

You just can’t close the door on this crowd. The party that brought us the worst economy since the Great Depression, that led us into Iraq and the worst foreign policy disaster in American history, that would like to take a hammer to Social Security and a chisel to Medicare, is back in control of the House of Representatives with the expressed mission of undermining all things Obama.

Damon Winter/The New York Times
Bob Herbert

Once we had Dick Cheney telling us that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and belligerently asserting that deficits don’t matter. We had Phil Gramm, Enron’s favorite senator and John McCain’s economic guru, blithely assuring us in 2008 that we were suffering from a “mental recession.”

(Mr. Gramm was some piece of work. A champion of deregulation, he was disdainful of ordinary people. “We’re the only nation in the world,” he once said, “where all of our poor people are fat.”)

Maybe the voters missed the entertainment value of the hard-hearted, compulsively destructive G.O.P. headliners. Maybe they viewed them the way audiences saw the larger-than-life villains in old-time melodramas. It must be something like that because it’s awfully hard to miss the actual policies of a gang that almost wrecked the country.

In any event, the G.O.P. has taken its place once again as the House majority and is vowing to do what it does best, which is make somebody miserable — in this case, President Obama. Representative Darrell Issa, the California Republican who is now chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said recently on the Rush Limbaugh program that Mr. Obama was “one of the most corrupt presidents in modern times.” He backed off a little on Sunday, saying that what he really thinks is that Mr. Obama is presiding over “one of the most corrupt administrations.”

This is the attitude of a man who has the power of subpoena and plans to conduct hundreds of hearings into the administration’s activities.

The mantra for Mr. Issa and the rest of the newly empowered Republicans in the House, including the new Budget Committee chairman, Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, is to cut spending and shrink government. But what’s really coming are patented G.O.P. efforts to spread misery beyond Mr. Obama and the Democrats to ordinary Americans struggling in what are still very difficult times.

It was ever thus. The fundamental mission of the G.O.P. is to shovel ever more money to those who are already rich. That’s why you got all that disgracefully phony rhetoric from Republicans about attacking budget deficits and embracing austerity while at the same time they were fighting like mad people to pile up the better part of a trillion dollars in new debt by extending the Bush tax cuts.

This is a party that has mastered the art of taking from the poor and the middle class and giving to the rich. We should at least be clear about this and stop being repeatedly hoodwinked — like Charlie Brown trying to kick Lucy’s football — by G.O.P. claims of fiscal responsibility.

There’s a reason the G.O.P. reveres Ronald Reagan and it’s not because of his fiscal probity. As Garry Wills wrote in “Reagan’s America”:

“Reagan nearly tripled the deficit in his eight years, and never made a realistic proposal for cutting it. As the biographer Lou Cannon noted, it was unfair for critics to say that Reagan was trying to balance the budget on the backs of the poor, since ‘he never seriously attempted to balance the budget at all.’ ”

We’ll see and hear a lot of populist foolishness from the Republicans as 2011 and 2012 unfold, but their underlying motivation is always the same. They are about making the rich richer. Thus it was not at all surprising to read on Politico that the new head of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Fred Upton of Michigan, had hired a former big-time lobbyist for the hospital and pharmaceuticals industries to oversee health care issues.

I remember President Bush going on television in September 2008, looking almost dazed as he said to the American people, “Our entire economy is in danger.”

Have we forgotten already who put us in such grave peril? Republicans benefit from the fact that memories are short and statutes of limitations shorter. It was the Republican leader in the House, Tom DeLay, who insisted against all reason and all the evidence of history that “nothing is more important in the face of war than cutting taxes.”

But that’s all water under the bridge. The Republicans are back in control of the House, ready to run interference for the rich as recklessly and belligerently as ever.

In 2011 We Must Face Reality Or Suffer The Consequences--Part One

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/30/alters-the-promise-epilog_n_802866.html

All,

Like I've been saying for well over a year now, it's way past time for all of us to get our heads out of the clouds and shut down any more silly and useless adolescent dreaming about who or what Obama "could be/should be." More than ever it's time for all of us to be fully committed adult citizens and take some serious responsibility for honestly dealing with the blatant REALITY of who and what this man and his wayward administration actually is and isn't. Our watchword for 2011 must be: No More Excuses! We must incessantly hold both this President and ourselves fully and equally ACCOUNTABLE for what by any objective standard is a simply awful and obviously failing national economic policy. What this means is that if we truly want real reform--and not just some halfass token version of same-- we are going to have to organize on a national level to put immense political pressure on the White House and Congress. Needless to say the Republicans will absolutely refuse to do anything but destroy this Presidency and all the rest of us in the bargain so the real WEIGHT is gonna be on the President and the Democratic Party to actually deliver on their promises or at the very least FIGHT LIKE MANIACS against the inevitable rollbacks that are sure to come if the President and the Democrats in the House and Senate don't fiercely stand up to the additional 69 Republican rightwingers who were elected to the House and Senate during the November, 2010 midterms. While we obviously must continue to generally support the President vis-a-vis and in opposition to the Republican right and their corporate sponsors this fundamentally provisional political and ideological support MUST BE PRINCIPLED AND CRITICAL at all times to be of any real use or practical value to either him or us. If we don't do what is necessary to change the direction of this economy now during 2011 you can rest assured that Obama will be a one term President and go down to ignominious defeat in 2012--and most importantly of all WE will be wiped out and decimated by an intense and unrelenting national rightwing backlash that will absolutely destroy everything and everyone in its path in the aftermath of that defeat. Mark my words...

Kofi


Jonathan Alter's 'The Promise' Epilogue: Obama Team's Dysfunction Prompted Lack Of Focus On Jobs; Bill Clinton Annoyed At White House
by Marcus Baram
December 30, 2010
The Huffington Post \


Some revelations about the Obama administration detailed in the new epilogue to the upcoming paperback release of Jonathan Alter's bestseller, "The Promise," probably won't please too many folks at the White House. Alter claims that a dysfunctional relationship between top White House aides hurt the administration's policy on job creation, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was almost dropped from financial reform legislation and was only reinstated after complaints by Elizabeth Warren, and Bill Clinton continually grumbles about being disrespected by the administration.

The Obama administration's perceived failure to take laser-like aim at the unemployment crisis was partly due to the dysfunctional relationship between White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, top economic adviser Larry Summers and senior adviser David Axelrod, specifically the intransigence of Summers, according to Alter:

"The inability to pivot in 2010 to a single-minded focus on jobs was a by-product of what one senior aide called "dysfunction" between Emanuel, Summers, and Axelrod. Rahm had always admired Larry, but he was becoming exasperated with his failure to give him a jobs plan he could sell. 'Week after week, Rahm would say, 'Let's explore this' or 'How about that?' and Larry would slow-walk everything,' recalled one senior advisor. 'He basically doesn't believe in the government helping small business'."

Alter writes that the CFPB survived certain death only because of Warren's commitment:

"The most popular provision of Dodd-Frank almost didn't happen. In late 2009 Elizabeth Warren learned that a proposed bureau of consumer financial protection had been dropped from the bill. She went to the White House to object, and the bureau, to the dismay of predatory lenders, was reinstated."

Obama's relationship with the Clintons remains strained and Bill Clinton constantly complains in private about how he's been disrespected by the administration, writes Alter.

Though they talk frequently, the former president was annoyed that Obama didn't give him credit for helping to negotiate a spy swap that led to the release from Russian jails of four Russians who had been working for the CIA (in the wake of the bust of Russian spies living in American suburbs six months ago), Clinton's aides tell Alter. In addition, Clinton was miffed that Samantha Power, who insulted Hillary during the 2008 campaign, was chosen as an emissary to Bosnia in July. ("Bill Clinton might not have accepted the job, but he wanted to be asked," Alter writes.)

"An old friend compared him [Clinton] to a big puppy dog who just needed some attention to be happy and helpful."

Clinton felt dissed because, after negotiating the release by North Korea of two imprisoned American journalists, he was told to travel on a separate plane so as not to overshadow the arrival of the women. "Some of these guys in the White House act small," one aide told Alter.

And Clinton's team was angry that former protégés like Rahm Emanuel didn't show the former president proper respect. After Clinton "worked like a nerd" to prepare a detailed 30-page memo on how to incentivize banks with loan guarantees to spur job creation, the White House ignored the memo for a few months, and then treated Clinton like a "prop" during Obama's meeting with CEOs. When a Clinton aide complained to Emanuel, "Are you serious?", the chief of staff replied that Clinton should be grateful he was on the president's schedule at all, writes Alter.

"Clinton felt better disposed toward his 1992 opponent, George H.W. Bush... one senior aide described Bush as a 'father figure' to Clinton, who never knew his natural father..."

American Politics 2010: Playing Infantile Games With Our Future Instead of Addressing Social and Economic Reality

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/30/us/politics/30freeze.html?_r=1&emc=na

All,

This is still more bullshit political gamesmanship and time diverting antics by President Obama masquerading as a honest and forthright attempt to address the red herring issue of "deficit spending" (which is now nothing more than a demagogic code phrase used by the wildly profligate and irresponsible Republican hypocrites in Congress who under the super corporate regime of Bushwhacker 2 was responsible for the largest increase in the federal deficit in the entire history of the United States!). The reason that the issue of the deficit is fundamentally a red herring and thus largely a manufactured political crisis at this point is not that there isn't a major problem with the federal budget being seriously out of whack economically as a direct result of a decade of massive tax cuts for the rich, virtually no legal or governmental regulation at all of Wall Street and the general financial sector of the economy, and a stubbornly insistent and steadfast refusal on the part of the Bush rightwing federal government and the private corporate sector to properly invest in education, health care reform, labor protection, social and economic infrastructure, a sound and progressive energy policy, real climate control, and a genuinely strong and effective environmental protection policy. Clearly all these things and more have thus contributed to the huge growth of a clearly untenable and absolutely unsustainable budgetary mess that MUST be addressed in a serious and responsible manner by the government at some point...

So NO the reason that the issue of "deficit spending" is a political red herring is NOT that major reform and real "change" is not needed to bring the government's and the larger economy's house in order. No. The reason is that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans want to do what is really necessary to fundamentally improve and transform the economy and the general society in the progressive direction of a far more just, fair, democratic, and equitable system than what currently exists. That would require that the wealthy elites and elected political representatives of every branch of government be held directly accountable and responsible on a political, ethical, economic and ideological scale that was unprecedented in American history. You know--actual social and economic Democracy instead of the criminally corrupt Plutocracy that currently dominates and controls our political and economic system...

Meanwhile President Obama and the two major political parties keep playing an irresponsible, time wasting, very dangerous, and ultimately lethal cat-and-mouse game of brinksmanship to see who blinks first in public from the self serving standpoint of the 2012 electoral sweepstakes. What all this grandstanding (and especially among the Republicans and their demented "Tea Party" cohorts) petty vindictive tactics really means is that NOTHING important, substantive, real, necessary, or useful will emerge from either major political party to solve or seriously address any of the many major problems and crises facing the American people in general and especially the poor, working, and lower middle class who constitute the overwhelming majority of those citizens being ravaged and destroyed by the current economy and civil society...

Kofi


Obama to Freeze Pay for Most Federal Workers
By PETER BAKER
November 29, 2010
New York Times


WASHINGTON — President Obama plans to announce a two-year pay freeze for civilian federal workers on Monday in his latest move intended to demonstrate concern over sky-high deficit spending.

The president’s proposal will effectively wipe out plans for a 1.4 percent across-the-board raise in 2011 for 2.1 million civilian federal government employees, including those working at the Defense Department, but the freeze would not affect the nation’s uniformed military personnel. The president has frozen the salaries of his own top White House staff members since taking office 22 months ago.

“Clearly this is a difficult decision,” said Jeffrey Zients, deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget and the government’s chief performance officer. “Federal workers are hard-working and dedicated.” But given the deficit, Mr. Zients added, “we believe this is the first of many difficult steps ahead.”

The pay freeze will save $2 billion in the current fiscal year that ends in September 2011, $28 billion over five years and more than $60 billion over 10 years, officials said. That represents just a tiny dent in a $1.3 trillion annual deficit, but it offers a symbolic gesture toward public anger over unemployment, the anemic economic recovery and rising national debt.

Mr. Zients said the president planned to announce the plan on Monday because of an approaching legal deadline for submitting a pay plan to Congress. But by doing it now, the president also effectively gets ahead of Republicans who have been talking about making such a move once they take over the House, and assume more seats in the Senate, in January. Some Republicans have gone further, proposing to slash federal worker salaries.

The number of federal workers making more than $150,000 a year has grown 10-fold in the last five years and doubled since Mr. Obama took office, according to a USA Today study this month. Since 2000, federal pay and benefits have increased 3 percent annually above inflation, compared with 0.8 percent for private sector workers, according to data cited by the newspaper.

This is not the first time Mr. Obama has addressed government pay to make a political point. In addition to freezing the salaries of top White House staff members when he took office, he later extended that freeze to political appointees throughout the government and canceled their bonuses.

The chairmen of a fiscal commission appointed by Mr. Obama have proposed a three-year freeze for federal employees in a draft report. The commission is supposed to issue a final report by Wednesday.

The Debilitating Costs of Capitulation: President Obama Caves In To His Republican Enemies

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/10/white-house-gives-in-on-bush-tax-cuts_n_781992.html

All,

How utterly spineless, inept, scared, and WEAK can anyone possibly be? Barack Obama received a record 69 million votes in 2008, beat McCain by 10 million votes and received the highest percentage of votes (53%) than any President since 1984 and yet has SQUANDERED, WASTED, AND GIVEN AWAY NEARLY ALL OF HIS POLITICAL CAPITAL TO THE REPUBLICANS IN JUST TWO YEARS! Unbelievable. Incredible. Stunning. Amazing. Unprecedented. Disgusting. I've never seen ANY person with this much actual political power absolutely lack any Guts, Heart, or Fight when it came to defending, advocating, or protecting their own alleged ideas, principles, values, and convictions. Is this man capable of fighting or standing up for ANYTHING? Clearly it's a rhetorical question at this point...

Kofi


White House Gives In On Bush Tax Cuts
by Howard Fineman and Sam Stein
November 11, 2010
Huffington Post


WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama's top adviser suggested to The Huffington Post late Wednesday that the administration is ready to accept an across-the-board, temporary continuation of steep Bush-era tax cuts, including those for the wealthiest taxpayers.

That appears to be the only way, said David Axelrod, that middle-class taxpayers can keep their tax cuts, given the legislative and political realities facing Obama in the aftermath of last week's electoral defeat.

"We have to deal with the world as we find it," Axelrod said during an unusually candid and reflective 90-minute interview in his office, steps away from the Oval Office. "The world of what it takes to get this done."

"There are concerns," he added, that Congress will continue to kick the can down the road in the future by passing temporary extensions for the wealthy time and time again. "But I don't want to trade away security for the middle class in order to make that point."

It has been widely assumed that the president would have to accept an across-the-board deal of some kind, but Axelrod's remarks were the first public confirmation of that fact -- and by a figure regarded as closer to Obama than any other White House staffer.

Also dealing "with the world as we find it," Axelrod declined repeatedly to comment on any of the controversial debt-reduction measures suggested by the chairs of the president's own commission -- even those, such as raising the Social Security retirement age, that go against Obama campaign pledges and strike at the heart of Democratic constituencies.

He said that the White House would wait until the commission made its final recommendations on Dec. 1 before adding, "the president's commitments haven't changed."



By giving ground on taxes and remaining silent on budget suggestions that others, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and AFL-CIO head Richard Trumka, quickly denounced, Axelrod showed the subdued caution of an adviser to a humbled boss.

But the top Obama aide also erected some barriers against newly-emboldened Republicans and their Pentagon allies.

Axelrod said that his boss would veto repeal of his cherished health care law, though he would "work with people" who "have constructive ideas about how to strengthen" it. The veto threat was not unexpected, but it was the first time that a top administration figure had issued such a threat on the record. And in doing so, Axelrod predicted that Republicans would be making a major misstep by challenging the White House's commitment on this front.

"I'm not going to prejudge what they are going to do," Axelrod said of Republican opposition to the legislation. "But I will tell you this -- we are firm in our commitment, we are willing to work with people to improve this plan we are not going to stand for those who want to undermine it and destroy it."

"The notion of spending the next two years fighting over this, I think, is a complete misreading of what the American people want," he added. "They want us to focus on the economy. They don't want us to fight the battles of the last two years. But we are not going to stand by and go back to allowing people with preexisting conditions to be discriminated against, go back to the situation where people can be thrown off their insurance simply because they become seriously ill or you can't get on your parents' insurance after the age of 20. There are so many things that are just central."

Meanwhile, on the war in Afghanistan -- an expensive and increasingly unpopular conflict -- Axelrod pushed back hard against the notion, floated in some recent stories quoting "senior administration sources," that the deadline for beginning troop withdrawals had been pushed back from July 2011 to some time in 2014.

"If it is being sourced to senior administration officials, then someone has bad administration sources," Axelrod said. "There is no change in the president's position. There is no change in that basic commitment."

But there is just such a change on taxes.

Although the president "took the position he felt was the right position" -- favoring a continuation of the cuts only for families earning up to $250,000 -- Axelrod portrayed this "optimal" stance as unrealistic in the lame-duck Congress that begins next week.

For one, time is not on the administration's side. All of the tax cuts, enacted in 2001 and 2003, will expire at the end of this year unless Congress acts. The Republicans in effect "built in tax increases," Axelrod said. And separating out different categories of tax cuts now -- extending some without extending others -- is politically unrealistic and procedurally difficult, he added.

"We don't want that tax increase to go forward for the middle class," he said, which means the administration will have to accept them all for some unspecified period of time. "But plainly, what we can't do is permanently extend these high income taxes."

In other words, the White House won't risk being blamed for raising taxes on the middle class even though, arguably, it is the GOP's refusal to separate the categories that has put Obama in this bind. The only condition, at least initially, seems to be that the tax cuts for the wealthy not be extended "permanently."

A student of history and a onetime political reporter, Axelrod expressed curiosity and even some optimism about the tea party, suggesting that Obama could work with them on matters such as a ban on spending earmarks and on winding down the war in Afghanistan.

If so, Obama would turn the Clinton-era triangulation strategy on its head, reaching out not to the moderates in the other party but to the new breed of conservatives who could bring the ideological arc of Congress full circle.

Can the White House work with them? "It is a fascinating time in our history," he said, "and I don't think anybody really knows. I mean I have watched carefully some of these folks on television. I don't think this is nearly as predictable as people think."

President Obama, in fact, has called every new Republican senator-elect and many of the incoming GOP House members -- "well over 100 calls" in all, said Axelrod.

That's how a shellacked president spends his plane time on a trip to Asia.

The National Debt Crisis and The Political Abdication of the Obama Administration To the Right

http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=content/obama-prepares-triangulate-himself


All,

Though many of us don't want to hear it this is the truth and we had all better wake up in the U.S. generally and Black America in particular to what is REALLY going on--and President Obama's clearly inept and sadly manipulative role in it-- before it's too late (and we're very close to that point already--much closer than any of us would care to admit)...Any other course is not only massive irresponsibility on our part as citizens but a sure recipe for disaster because after last week's horrific vote for a Republican majority in the House chamber of Congress the virulently racist, very powerful, extremely wealthy, and well organized rightwing in this country is gonna continue to relentlessly attack and destroy not only Obama's presidency but this society in general. In that case if we as citizens don't properly respond on a national scale to this dangerous challenge in a politically aggressive and well organized and coordinated manner only we will be the huge losers in both the short and long run...

The following extraordinary article by Glen Ford, editor of the Black Agenda Report (BAR) was initially published three weeks ago on October 20, 2010 and has turned out to be eerily and disturbingly prophetic given the shocking press conference held today by the Co-Chairmen of Obama's debt commission which made a series of very reactionary and ethically bankrupt recommendations (for the ugly details read today's New York Times article "Panel Seeks Social Security Cuts and Tax Increases" by Jackie Calmes following the Glen Ford piece below)...

Kofi


Obama Prepares to Triangulate Himself
By Glen Ford
October 20, 2010
Black Agenda Report

(http://blackagendareport.com)


by BAR executive editor Glen Ford


What a guy! Barack Obama has neutralized Blacks, the white left, and the majority of his own party in service to Wall Street, and some still call him “liberal” (The insane call him “socialist.”) With Social Security and Medicare in his sights, “the stage is set for a performance of presidential political gymnastics that will make Bill Clinton, once known as the Great Triangulator, bow down to the master.”

“Obama invented the deficit reduction commission as his customized vehicle to subvert his own party’s cherished ‘entitlement’ programs.”

One thing is certain: the corporations will win and civilization will lose on November 2nd. The outcome is foreordained, since the dwindling electoral forces of civilization don’t have enough candidates in contention even to fill an effective caucus.

With 83 nominal members, the Progressive Congressional Caucus [5] is, on paper, the largest of the House ideological groupings, but has been neutered since Barack Obama entered the White House. The Congressional Black Caucus has not been a coherent force for progressive change for most of this century, and now behaves as if lobotomized by the presence of a Black chief executive. Having allowed themselves to be whipped, kicked and scorned by a White House concerned only for the president’s most narrow interests and schemes, “left” Democrats are at their nadir of legislative influence, despite their chairmanships.

Whether the GOP actually wins one or both chambers of Congress or not, the people’s interests are in deep trouble. The most immediate threat looms, not from the Tea Party, which will no doubt have its own little caucus in the next Congress, but from Barack Obama and his President’s National Commission [6] on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. When the right-heavy commission makes its recommendations in early December, the stage will be set for a performance of presidential political gymnastics that will make Bill Clinton, once known as the Great Triangulator, bow down to the master.

Barack Obama will triangulate himself.

“’Left’ Democrats are at their nadir of legislative influence, despite their chairmanships.”

President Clinton skillfully triangulated his own Democrats, seeking to position himself between the party’s liberal-ish core and the Republicans, thus moving the center of political gravity rightward through the Nineties. Obama, whose first major act while still a candidate was to save the Bush bank bailout after it failed a first vote in October, 2008, has elevated Clinton-style triangulation to what he hopes passes for statesmanship. Obama likes to calls it “non-partisan,” “consensus-building” politics and other variations on the theme, but the result is always the same: the fundamental interests of corporations are protected at the beginning of the process, which can only end with the people in worse shape than before it started. This is how a broad and deep public demand for comprehensive health reform was transformed into a guaranteed, subsidized, central role in the national health system for the hated insurance and drug companies for the foreseeable future.

Obama, a genius at creating opportunities for himself while undermining the life prospects of others, invented the deficit reduction commission as his customized vehicle to subvert his own party’s cherished “entitlement” programs: Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, and others. Republicans didn’t force his hand or box him in. Instead, Obama set the torpedoes in motion against entitlements in the days before his inauguration, declaring, on January 8, 2009 [7], that an overhaul of Medicare and Social Security would be “a central part” of his presidency. Not long afterwards, he said that Social Security and other entitlements would be “on the table” for cutting. All this, before any Republican had blurted an angry word about Obama in congressional debate.

“Obama has elevated Clinton-style triangulation to what he hopes passes for statesmanship.”

Obama’s ambush of entitlements is premeditated. He was determined from the very start to succeed where George Bush failed – by gutting Social Security. That’s how Obama measures greatness.

The problem was, most Republicans remembered Bush’s Social Security debacle of 2005 [8], and were not anxious to relive the experience, while debating Social Security was the last thing on Democratic congressional minds. With Republicans in no mood to launch a legislative attack on Social Security, there was nobody for Obama to make one of his grand comprises with. So, in February of this year, he issued an executive order [9] creating his own anti-entitlement missile, the 18-person [10] panel that quickly became known as the “cat food” commission [11], harkening back to the pre-Social Security days when many of the elderly where reduced to eating cat food.

Obama’s trick was to conjure up a political demand for the gutting of entitlements when no serious movement in that direction existed in the Congress. The commission route allowed him to concoct a majority right-wing constituency in a bottle, so to speak, by weighting the membership with pro-corporate players.

No one doubts that the panel is rigged to recommend cuts that Democrats (and a few Republicans) would be prepared to fight tooth and nail if proposed by the GOP. Blood would flow in the halls of the House and Senate, and in the end the assailants would likely lose. But by packaging the poison in a commission, Obama is allowed to behave as if the entitlement debate has oozed from the ether, demanding to be made manifest.

“The commission route allowed him to concoct a majority right-wing constituency in a bottle, so to speak.”

Now comes the good part. In a classic triangulation, Obama would position himself as close to the Republican legislative position as politically convenient. However, that’s easier said than done, and full of risks, in the heat of debate on tricky congressional terrain. Instead, the presidential commission, acting as the supposed “deliberator” of the fate of the nation’s sick and elderly, will spew forth a range of recommendations from which Obama will pick and choose. He will vow to protect “the most vulnerable” from the more draconian ideas put forward by his commission. In the end he will stake out and occupy a “non-partisan,” “consensus” center as defined by the makeup of the commission, the president’s own creation.

Obama will have triangulated himself, and screwed us all. Mark my words.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com


http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/11/us/politics/11fiscal.html?nl=us&emc=politicsemailema1&pagewanted=all


Panel Seeks Social Security Cuts and Tax Increases
By JACKIE CALMES
November 10, 2010
New York Times

WASHINGTON — The chairmen of President Obama’s bipartisan commission on reducing the national debt outlined a politically provocative and economically ambitious package of spending cuts and tax increases on Wednesday, igniting a debate that is likely to grip the country for years.


The plan calls for deep cuts in domestic and military spending, a gradual 15-cents-a-gallon increase in the federal gasoline tax, limiting or eliminating popular tax breaks in return for lower rates, and benefit cuts and an increased retirement age for Social Security.

Those changes and others, none of which would take effect before 2012 to avoid undermining the tepid economic recovery, would erase nearly $4 trillion from projected deficits through 2020, the proposal says, and stabilize the accumulated debt.

“It’s time to lay it out on the table and let the American people start to chew on it,” said Alan K. Simpson, the former Republican Senate leader who is one of the co-chairmen, along with Erskine B. Bowles, who was White House chief of staff under President Bill Clinton.

Their outline will be the basis for negotiation within the commission, which has a Dec. 1 deadline for submitting a final plan. It represents a challenge to both parties: to Mr. Obama and the Democrats, to show in the wake of the midterm election that they are serious about their pledges to address long-term deficits, and to Republicans, who for the most part have ruled out consideration of tax increases even as they have promised new adherence to fiscal responsibility.

Liberal groups immediately condemned the plan when news of it broke, for its Social Security and Medicare changes and for the scope of the spending cuts. The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, in a statement called it “simply unacceptable.”

The furor on the left was not matched — yet — by a similar outcry from the right to the draft’s proposed revenue increases, cuts to the military or other options.

The plan has many elements with the potential to draw intense political fire. It lays out options for overhauling the tax code that include limiting or eliminating the mortgage interest deduction, the child tax credit and the earned income tax credit. It envisions cutting Pentagon weapons programs and paring back almost all domestic programs.

The plan would reduce cost-of-living increases for all federal programs, including Social Security. It would reduce projected Social Security benefits to most retirees in later decades, though low-income people would get higher benefits. The retirement age for full benefits would be slowly raised to 69 from 67 by 2075, with a “hardship exemption” for people who physically cannot work past 62. And higher levels of income would be subject to payroll taxes.

But the plan would not count Social Security savings toward the overall deficit-reduction goal that Mr. Obama set for fiscal year 2015, reflecting the chairmen’s sensitivity to liberal critics who have complained that Social Security should be fixed only for its own sake, not to help balance the nation’s books.

Mr. Obama created the commission last February in the hope it would provide political cover for bold action against deficits in 2011. His stance now, in the wake of his party’s drubbing, will go a long way toward telling whether he tacks to the political center — by embracing such proposals — or shifts to the left and leaves them on a shelf.

For Republicans, the chairmen’s proposals and a similar report coming next week from a private bipartisan group will challenge their contention that the budget can be balanced by spending cuts alone. That is a claim that many conservative economists and budget analysts reject, given the scale of projected debt as the baby boom generation retires and begins claiming costly federal benefits, after a severe recession.

Mr. Bowles and Mr. Simpson said their plan was “a starting point” as members of the commission met behind closed doors to consider it.

That was clear from the initial reactions of the members, nine of them Democrats, seven Republicans. None embraced the package and several made clear they would not support it without big changes.

“I think every member of the commission would agree that this is not the plan,” said Representative Jan Schakowsky, Democrat of Illinois, who is perhaps the panel’s most liberal member.

The group had made no decisions before the midterm elections, to avoid politicizing the painful options. Even so, the election results — by emboldening victorious antitax conservatives and having led to the defeat of many fiscally conservative Congressional Democrats — are widely seen as having reduced the already slim chance that a supermajority of the commission could agree to a package of proposals by Dec. 1.

Under Mr. Obama’s executive order creating the panel of 12 members of Congress and six private citizens, 14 of the 18 commissioners must agree in order to send any package to Congress for a vote in December. The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, and Ms. Pelosi, who will remain the speaker until January, have promised in writing that the Senate would vote first and, if it approves a plan, the House would vote.

“I think it’s possible” that 14 members will agree, said Senator Tom Coburn, a conservative Oklahoma Republican who worked closely with the chairmen on proposed reductions from the military and in so-called tax expenditures, the myriad tax breaks for individuals and businesses that cost more than $1 trillion a year. “You don’t know until you see what the final plan is.”

In five hours of deliberations on Wednesday, the commission did not discuss the plan’s particulars much but instead talked at length about whether a lame-duck Congress would have time to write specific legislation and then vote, members said in interviews. It was unclear, they said, whether that was a sign other members thought the commission actually could reach agreement, or whether they were hiding behind concerns about legislative procedures to avoid tough policy decisions.

“At least people stayed in the room,” Andy Stern, the former president of the Service Employees International Union, said in an interview, recalling his concerns and others’ that Republicans would walk out if taxes were on the table and Democrats if Social Security and other spending programs were.

Right now the biggest issue facing the lame-duck Congress is whether to extend the Bush-era income tax cuts, which expire Dec. 31, for all taxpayers, as Republicans want, or for income below $250,000, as Mr. Obama and Democrats want. The Bowles-Simpson plan includes one option that assumes only the lower-income rates are extended and another that ends all Bush tax rates and replaces the tax code with simpler, lower rates and many fewer tax breaks.

Extending all the Bush tax cuts through 2020 would add more than $4 trillion to the debt — coincidentally, about the same amount that the chairmen’s painful options are designed to cut in the same time frame.

Their proposed simplification of the tax code would repeal or modify a number of popular tax breaks — including the deductibility of mortgage interest payments — so that income tax rates could be reduced across the board. Under one option, individual income tax rates would decline to as low as 8 percent for the lowest income bracket (it is now 10 percent) and to 23 percent for the highest bracket (now 35 percent). The corporate tax rate, now 35 percent, would be reduced to as low as 26 percent.

But how low the rates are set would depend on how many tax breaks are reduced or eliminated. Some of them, including the mortgage interest deduction and the exemption from taxes for employees’ health benefits, are political sacred cows.

The 18.4-cents-a-gallon federal gasoline tax would rise by 15 cents between 2013 and 2015 so that transportation spending no longer requires money from the general treasury.

The plan would cut $2 from spending for every $1 in new revenues. Total spending would be about 22 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product, and revenues would be held to 21 percent.

Cuts in annual discretionary spending, domestic and military, would be the largest in recent decades. Farm subsidies would be reduced. To further reduce growth in the fast-growing entitlement programs, the plan would expand on the hard-won Medicare cost savings in Mr. Obama’s health care law. And it would limit malpractice awards, long a Republican goal.

Telling the Whole Truth About the U.S. Economy--and What Needs To Be Done About It: Paul Krugman Speaks

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Paul Krugman

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/05/opinion/05krugman.html?src=ISMR_AP_LO_MST_FB

All,

Paul Krugman is one of the very few individuals in this country writing about politics and economics today who consistently and relentlessly tells the straight-up unadorned truth about exactly what is happening and why with real insight, clarity, depth, intelligence, courage and, yes, FOCUS. He also never fails to spell out precisely what a sound, practical alternative should be in his critiques. In this rancid climate I consider his tireless outstanding work to be positively intellectually and politically heroic. If only Obama had chosen this man as his major economic advisor instead of those corrupt Wall Street cronies and financial insider hacks Timothy Geithner and Laurence Summers (who took his crass opportunist ass back to Har-vard last month). But to choose someone like Krugman for his cabinet would have required the President to be a genuine progressive (or at least a real liberal) in the first place...Now it's too late. The thorough beatdown that the Republican and Tea Party right administered just two days ago absolutely ensures that NOTHING will be done on the legislative front for at least the next two years. Barack and the Democratic Party have seriously blown a major opportunity over the past two years to transform the direction of the country when the President and the DP controlled the Presidency and both houses of Congress. It's a major failure of political nerve and vision that can't possibly be papered over by merely claiming that the inheritance of the Bushwhacker's huge mess wouldn't allow for any other viable alternative(s). That ain't true and we shouldn't pretend that it is. The stakes are much too high in the present environment for those kind of easy excuses to be made without a serious challenge...

Kofi



OP-ED COLUMNIST
The Focus Hocus-Pocus
By PAUL KRUGMAN
November 4, 2010
New York Times

Democrats, declared Evan Bayh in an Op-Ed article on Wednesday in The Times, “overreached by focusing on health care rather than job creation during a severe recession.” Many others have been saying the same thing: the notion that the Obama administration erred by not focusing on the economy is hardening into conventional wisdom.

But I have no idea what, if anything, people mean when they say that. The whole focus on “focus” is, as I see it, an act of intellectual cowardice — a way to criticize President Obama’s record without explaining what you would have done differently.

After all, are people who say that Mr. Obama should have focused on the economy saying that he should have pursued a bigger stimulus package? Are they saying that he should have taken a tougher line with the banks? If not, what are they saying? That he should have walked around with furrowed brow muttering, “I’m focused, I’m focused”?

Mr. Obama’s problem wasn’t lack of focus; it was lack of audacity. At the start of his administration he settled for an economic plan that was far too weak. He compounded this original sin both by pretending that everything was on track and by adopting the rhetoric of his enemies.

The aftermath of major financial crises is almost always terrible: severe crises are typically followed by multiple years of very high unemployment. And when Mr. Obama took office, America had just suffered its worst financial crisis since the 1930s. What the nation needed, given this grim prospect, was a really ambitious recovery plan.

Could Mr. Obama actually have offered such a plan? He might not have been able to get a big plan through Congress, or at least not without using extraordinary political tactics. Still, he could have chosen to be bold — to make Plan A the passage of a truly adequate economic plan, with Plan B being to place blame for the economy’s troubles on Republicans if they succeeded in blocking such a plan.

But he chose a seemingly safer course: a medium-size stimulus package that was clearly not up to the task. And that’s not 20/20 hindsight. In early 2009, many economists, yours truly included, were more or less frantically warning that the administration’s proposals were nowhere near bold enough.

Worse, there was no Plan B. By late 2009, it was already obvious that the worriers had been right, that the program was much too small. Mr. Obama could have gone to the nation and said, “My predecessor left the economy in even worse shape than we realized, and we need further action.” But he didn’t. Instead, he and his officials continued to claim that their original plan was just right, damaging their credibility even further as the economy continued to fall short.

Meanwhile, the administration’s bank-friendly policies and rhetoric — dictated by fear of hurting financial confidence — ended up fueling populist anger, to the benefit of even more bank-friendly Republicans. Mr. Obama added to his problems by effectively conceding the argument over the role of government in a depressed economy.

I felt a sense of despair during Mr. Obama’s first State of the Union address, in which he declared that “families across the country are tightening their belts and making tough decisions. The federal government should do the same.” Not only was this bad economics — right now the government must spend, because the private sector can’t or won’t — it was almost a verbatim repeat of what John Boehner, the soon-to-be House speaker, said when attacking the original stimulus. If the president won’t speak up for his own economic philosophy, who will?

So where, in this story, does “focus” come in? Lack of nerve? Yes. Lack of courage in one’s own convictions? Definitely. Lack of focus? No.

And why would failing to tackle health care have produced a better outcome? The focus people never explain.

Of course, there’s a subtext to the whole line that health reform was a mistake: namely, that Democrats should stop acting like Democrats and go back to being Republicans-lite. Parse what people like Mr. Bayh are saying, and it amounts to demanding that Mr. Obama spend the next two years cringing and admitting that conservatives were right.

There is an alternative: Mr. Obama can take a stand.

For one thing, he still has the ability to engineer significant relief to homeowners, one area where his administration completely dropped the ball during its first two years. Beyond that, Plan B is still available. He can propose real measures to create jobs and aid the unemployed and put Republicans on the spot for standing in the way of the help Americans need.

Would taking such a stand be politically risky? Yes, of course. But Mr. Obama’s economic policy ended up being a political disaster precisely because he tried to play it safe. It’s time for him to try something different.