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http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100201/younge
http://www.agenceglobal.com/Article.asp?Id=2234
All,
An excellent nuanced critique as well as mature political/ideological projection of the profound need for the analyses and activism of true progressives and the general Left to move far beyond (in our work and our lives) any infantile notions of unrequited belief in, passive support of, or infantile disillusionment with Obama or any other politician. What Younge eloquently reminds us is that the real fight for Democracy in all of its many dimensions is left up to us as always and that our collective committment to building and sustaining an ongoing national social movement is absolutely paramount in that regard. Any other course at this point is not only delusional but fails to acknowledge that we are citizens and as such are the only ones who can really make fundamental change...
Kofi
Believers in Great Men Think Alike
by Gary Younge
The Nation
February 1, 2010
After rereading The God That Failed, a book in which six prominent ex-Marxists relate their disillusionment with communism, the late Palestinian intellectual Edward Said expressed his irritation at what seemed like a show trial for a straw man. "Why as an intellectual did you believe in a god anyway? And besides, who gave you the right to imagine that your early belief and later disenchantment were so important?"
Obama's first anniversary in power is approaching to howls of betrayal from parts of the left. Let's begin by acknowledging that there are many grounds for disappointment. The failure to show leadership in the healthcare debate; the decision to leave much of Bush's torture apparatus intact; the lack of alacrity on ending the Iraq occupation; failing to get rid of "don't ask, don't tell"; bailing on his pledges to renegotiate NAFTA and impose a foreclosure moratorium.
Some of these things can be explained, but none should be excused. It is true that Obama inherited a mess. But that is no reason to give him the benefit of the doubt on his campaign promises. He's the president. He has all the benefits he needs. With one in eight people on food stamps, one in six black people unemployed and thousands still being slaughtered in Afghanistan and Iraq, "change" is not a slogan for many who backed him; it's an urgent necessity.
The past year has been a painful lesson in the distinction between elections, politics and power. Elections change personnel; politics changes agendas; power is the means by which those agendas are put into action. Getting Obama into the White House was the beginning of the process, not the end. In the context of his campaign, the balance of forces in American politics and the demands of those who elected him, these frustrations make sense. Outside it, the leap from disenchantment to accusations of betrayal owes more to emotional and cognitive dissonance than political critique or strategic intervention.
Broadly speaking, this outrage flows from two camps -- those who placed too much faith in what he might do and those who placed none.
From the first, there is the anguish of the infatuated suitor scorned. I loved you, I followed you, I believed in you and this is how you repay me. This is little more than projection. Obama never claimed he was a radical. True, he did offer hope and inspiration. But I don't recall him saying that within a year the entrenched interests of American capital, the lobbyists, corporations, Fox commentators and militarists would throw their hands up in surrender at the flash of his smile and the lilt of his rhetoric. His decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan, for example, is definitely wrongheaded. But to qualify as betrayal he would have had to have promised something else, when the truth is this is one pledge he kept and many of us wish he hadn't.
From the second group, there is the self-satisfied smirk of the pundit for whom the itch to say "I told you so" has become too irresistible not to scratch. Absent any other coherent political or electoral strategy that might get us from where we were to where we need to be, they got their disillusion in early to avoid the rush. Refusing to see any potential in the mobilization of huge numbers of young, black, Latino and union workers who took part in his campaign, they understood the energy and excitement as little more than a moment of mass delusion. Like a broken clock, they just had to wait until the moment when they could pronounce themselves correct. In the words of Friedrich Engels, "What childish innocence it is to present one's own impatience as a theoretically convincing argument!"
While these two camps are driven by different impulses, they have two important things in common. First, they share a right-wing assumption, made famous by Thomas Carlyle, that history is made by "great men" rather than the far more complex interaction of people, time, place and power. Their ire is trained on one man and one alone. Not a system, institution or kaleidoscope of forces but Obama. If he were better, things would be different. If he tried harder, he could succeed. Such charges betray a devotion to a man and reverence for an office that is indecent in a democracy and incompatible with left politics.
Second, it suggests that this "great man" exists as an abstraction, in the absence of other forces, constraints and material realities. What movements might support or oppose him and what events might distract him are, to these detractors, apparently irrelevant. They reduce politics from an engagement with the world as it is to an act of will to construct a new world out of whole cloth. In this world the need to get sixty votes in the Senate, and the compromises that might emerge from that reality, have no meaning.
The disappointments of Obama's first year were never difficult to predict. They were evident not only in his politics but in the alignment of forces and institutions in which he is embedded. Obama may have emerged as the most viable progressive candidate in these elections and the most progressive Democrat in the White House since Lyndon Johnson. But that is not the same as his actually being progressive.
Disappointment is one thing you can usually be certain of if you are on the liberal left in America. Optimism is the real challenge. Some of us drew hope from the energy, activism and diverse nature of Obama's base, which we believed might emerge as a movement. That hasn't happened. But it was rooted in an understanding not that he would lead us leftward but that there might now be enough of us to push him leftward and that he might be responsive to that pressure. "If there is no struggle there is no progress," said abolitionist Frederick Douglass. "Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."
Gary Younge, the Alfred Knobler Journalism Fellow at The Nation Institute, is the New York correspondent for the London Guardian and the author of No Place Like Home: A Black Briton's Journey Through the Deep South (Mississippi) and Stranger in a Strange Land: Travels in the Disunited States (New Press).
Copyright © 2010 The Nation – distributed by Agence Global
---------------
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/26/opinion/26herbert.html?th&emc=th
All,
"If the truth hurts then you'll be in pain and if the truth drives you crazy then you'll just be insane."
This is an excellent and timely piece by Bob Herbert. The president seriously needs to read it...He might learn something important about himself...
Kofi
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Obama’s Credibility Gap
By BOB HERBERT
Published: January 25, 2010
New York Times
Who is Barack Obama?
Americans are still looking for the answer, and if they don’t get it soon — or if they don’t like the answer — the president’s current political problems will look like a walk in the park.
Mr. Obama may be personally very appealing, but he has positioned himself all over the political map: the anti-Iraq war candidate who escalated the war in Afghanistan; the opponent of health insurance mandates who made a mandate to buy insurance the centerpiece of his plan; the president who stocked his administration with Wall Street insiders and went to the mat for the banks and big corporations, but who is now trying to present himself as a born-again populist.
Mr. Obama is in danger of being perceived as someone whose rhetoric, however skillful, cannot always be trusted. He is creating a credibility gap for himself, and if it widens much more he won’t be able to close it.
Mr. Obama’s campaign mantra was “change” and most of his supporters took that to mean that he would change the way business was done in Washington and that he would reverse the disastrous economic policies that favored mega-corporations and the very wealthy at the expense of the middle class and the poor.
“Tonight, more Americans are out of work, and more are working harder for less,” said Mr. Obama in his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in August 2008. “More of you have lost your homes and even more are watching your home values plummet. More of you have cars you can’t afford to drive, credit card bills you can’t afford to pay, and tuition that’s beyond your reach.”
Voters watching the straight-arrow candidate delivering that speech, in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Depression, would not logically have thought that an obsessive focus on health insurance would trump job creation as the top domestic priority of an Obama administration.
But that’s what happened. Moreover, questions were raised about Mr. Obama’s candor when he spoke about health care. In his acceptance speech, for example, candidate Obama took a verbal shot at John McCain, sharply criticizing him for offering “a health care plan that would actually tax people’s benefits.”
Now Mr. Obama favors a plan that would tax at least some people’s benefits. Mr. Obama also repeatedly said that policyholders who were pleased with their plans and happy with their doctors would be able to keep both under his reform proposals.
Well, that wasn’t necessarily so, as the president eventually acknowledged. There would undoubtedly be changes in some people’s coverage as a result of “reform,” and some of those changes would be substantial. At a forum sponsored by ABC News last summer, Mr. Obama backed off of his frequent promise that no changes would occur, saying only that “if you are happy with your plan, and if you are happy with your doctor, we don’t want you to have to change.”
These less-than-candid instances are emblematic of much bigger problems. Mr. Obama promised during the campaign that he would be a different kind of president, one who would preside over a more open, more high-minded administration that would be far more in touch with the economic needs of ordinary working Americans. But no sooner was he elected than he put together an economic team that would protect, above all, the interests of Wall Street, the pharmaceutical industry, the health insurance companies, and so on.
How can you look out for the interests of working people with Tim Geithner whispering in one ear and Larry Summers in the other?
Now with his poll numbers down and the Democrats’ filibuster-proof margin in the Senate about to vanish, Mr. Obama is trying again to position himself as a champion of the middle class. Suddenly, with the public appalled at the scandalous way the health care legislation was put together, and with Democrats facing a possible debacle in the fall, Mr. Obama is back in campaign mode. Every other utterance is about “fighting” for the middle class, “fighting” for jobs, “fighting” against the big bad banks.
The president who has been aloof and remote and a pushover for the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries, who has been locked in the troubling embrace of the Geithners and Summers and Ben Bernankes of the world, all of a sudden is a man of the people. But even as he is promising to fight for jobs, a very expensive proposition, he’s proposing a spending freeze that can only hurt job-creating efforts.
Mr. Obama will deliver his State of the Union address Wednesday night. The word is that he will offer some small bore assistance to the middle class. But more important than the content of this speech will be whether the president really means what he says. Americans want to know what he stands for, where his line in the sand is, what he’ll really fight for, and where he wants to lead this nation.
They want to know who their president really is.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/26/us/26bar.html?nl=us&emc=politicsemailemb1
All,
Justice John Paul Stevens--age 89-- is the last of the truly great progressives on the Supreme Court. It's a great tragedy that individuals of integrity, wisdom, courage, moral clarity, compassion, and intellectual depth like Justice Stevens are becoming as rare as liberals who actually stand for something and are willing to fight for principle no matter who or what the opposition is. It's an indictment of this society and especially our backward, infantile, oppressive, and utterly corrupt political and legal systems that a man of Stevens's stature, independence, and strength of character is becoming so rare generally in our civic and public life. If only President Obama and the Democratic Party had Justice Stevens's courage and unwavering committment to real social change no matter what we would all be much further ahead on major questions of justice, equality, and freedom before the law than we are now...
Kofi
SIDEBAR
After 34 Years, a Plainspoken Justice Gets Louder
By ADAM LIPTAK
Published: January 25, 2010
WASHINGTON
New York Times
The Supreme Court announced its big campaign finance decision at 10 in the morning last Thursday. By 10:30 a.m., after Justice Anthony M. Kennedy had offered a brisk summary of the majority opinion and Justice John Paul Stevens labored through a 20-minute rebuttal, a sort of twilight had settled over the courtroom.
It seemed the Stevens era was ending.
Justice Stevens, who will turn 90 in April, joined the court in 1975 and is the longest-serving current justice by more than a decade. He has given signals that he intends to retire at the end of this term, and his dissent on Thursday was shot through with disappointment, frustration and uncharacteristic sarcasm.
He seemed weary, and more than once he stumbled over and mispronounced ordinary words in the lawyer’s lexicon — corruption, corporation, allegation. Sometimes he would take a second or third run at the word, sometimes not.
But there was no mistaking his basic message. “The rule announced today — that Congress must treat corporations exactly like human speakers in the political realm — represents a radical change in the law,” he said from the bench. “The court’s decision is at war with the views of generations of Americans.”
That was the plainspoken style of the last years of Justice Stevens’s tenure. In cases involving prisoners held without charge at Guantánamo Bay and the mentally retarded on death row, his version of American justice was propelled by common sense and moral clarity, and it commanded a majority. He was on the short end of the 2008 decision finding that the Second Amendment protected an individual right to bear arms, and he had mixed success in fighting what he saw as illegitimate justifications for discrimination against African-Americans, women and homosexuals.
Justice Stevens is the leader of the court’s liberal wing, and its three other members — Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor — all joined his 90-page dissent. They must have been tempted to write separately as well, as the case was bristling with issues of particular interest to all of them. Instead, they allowed the spotlight to shine solely on Justice Stevens.
There was no such solidarity among the conservatives. Though Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. all joined Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s majority opinion on its main point, three of them added separate concurrences.
In his dissent, Justice Stevens said no principle required overruling two major campaign finance precedents. “The only relevant thing that has changed since” those two decisions, he wrote, “is the composition of this court.”
In Justice Stevens’s early years on the court, his views often seemed idiosyncratic, and he would often write separate opinions joined by no other justice. Over the years, though, he has emerged as a master tactician, and he came to use his seniority to great advantage. The senior justice in the majority has the power to assign the majority opinion, and Justice Stevens used that power with patience and skill.
This term, though, Justice Stevens has been more of a loner. Thursday’s decision, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, was only the 10th signed decision of the term. In the previous nine, Justice Stevens wrote separately and only for himself three times. On a fourth occasion, he was joined only by Justice Kennedy.
A theme ran through these recent opinions: that the Supreme Court had lost touch with fundamental notions of fair play. In two of the cases, Justice Stevens lashed out at the court’s failure to condemn what he called shoddy work by defense lawyers in death penalty cases.
On Wednesday, in Wood v. Allen, Justice Stevens dissented from a majority decision that said that a lawyer fresh out of law school had made a reasonable strategic choice in not pursuing evidence that his client was mentally retarded.
“A decision cannot be fairly characterized as ‘strategic’ unless it is a conscious choice between two legitimate and rational alternatives,” Justice Stevens wrote. “It must be borne of deliberation and not happenstance, inattention, or neglect.”
He made a similar point this month in a second capital case, Smith v. Spisak.
“It is difficult to convey how thoroughly egregious counsel’s closing argument was,” Justice Stevens wrote of a defense lawyer’s work. “Suffice it to say that the argument shares far more in common with a prosecutor’s closing than with a criminal defense attorney’s. Indeed, the argument was so outrageous that it would have rightly subjected a prosecutor to charges of misconduct.”
In the second case, Justice Stevens did vote to uphold the death sentence, saying that even a closing argument worthy of Clarence Darrow would not have spared the defendant.
That carefully calibrated distinction was of a piece with the view he announced in 2008 in Baze v. Rees, when he said he had come to the conclusion that the death penalty violates the Eighth Amendment. But he went on to say that his conclusion did not justify “a refusal to respect precedents that remain a part of our law.”
Thursday’s decision in the Citizens United case was more full-throated.
“The majority blazes through our precedents,” he wrote, “overruling or disavowing a body of case law” that included seven decisions.
Justice Stevens, who served in the Navy during World War II, reached back to those days to show the depth of his outrage at the majority’s conclusion that the government may not make legal distinctions based on whether a corporation or a person was doing the speaking.
“Such an assumption,” he wrote, “would have accorded the propaganda broadcasts to our troops by ‘Tokyo Rose’ during World War II the same protection as speech by Allied commanders.”
The reference to Tokyo Rose was probably lost on many of Justice Steven’s readers. But the concluding sentence of what may be his last major dissent could not have been clearer.
“While American democracy is imperfect,” he wrote, “few outside the majority of this court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.”
http://www.theroot.com/views/how-barack-obama-paving-way-palin-presidency
All,
OK, granted--this article is a little over-the-top and melodramatic in some ways but the general intellectual insight and clarity of Jeter's overall analysis-- beyond of course his personal predictions about Sarah Palin specifically--is very accurate and deeply disturbing. What Jeter gets just right in this article is a clear and lucid understanding of just how powerful and enduring the centuries long tradition of racist and extreme rightwing demagoguery is in American politics and culture, and how the rancid "legacy of the Confederacy" permeates every single aspect of political, economic, and social reality in both our major structural institutions and the general social culture of the United States. It is this tradition and legacy that is attacking and excoriating Obama's agenda today and that far too often Obama himself is running away in fear of. This of course only plays into their hands and the seemingly bizarre and desperate Republican strategy of simply saying NO to every single thing Obama or the Democratic Party proposes legislatively is now working by default simply because Obama refuses to confront and defeat this tendency on his own independent political and ideological terms--and that is because it is now clear that overall Obama has no firm or concretely progressive politics that can't be changed or weakened to accomodate his conservative enemies whenever it becomes clear that Obama is in for a real dogfight on fundamental principles. By always trying to avoid or sidestep these inevitable and NECESSARY battles over political and ideological terrain and ideas Obama has in effect allowed his and our enemies to acquire strategic territory and authority over important questions dealing with the national political economy and the general social culture that they otherwise wouldn't have if Obama and the DP generally had the courage and conviction to fight and oppose.
So as Jeter says "Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid." Today, America is looking more and more like the Weimar Republic circa 1930 and any reading of modern political history that would simply dismiss this assessment as also being too over-the-top or melodramatic hasn't been paying very close attention to just how heinous and destructive political life has been in this country over the past 40 years and what it has wrought...Stay tuned...
Kofi
Published on The Root (http://www.theroot.com)
How Barack Obama Is Paving the Way for a Palin Presidency
By: Jon Jeter
Posted: January 25, 2010
The Root
You don’t have to be psychic to read the tea leaves. Be afraid, be very afraid.
It does not take a pollster, partisan or psychic to see a harbinger of things to come in Massachusetts voters’ choice of a Republican to fill Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat. If Barack Obama’s next three years in the White House are anything like his first, he will surely be a one-term president.
And for black America, that’s the good news.
Because if history is any guide, the truly awful news is that the smart money is on Sarah Palin to replace Obama in the White House.
Foreshadowing a Palin presidency is a perfect, gathering storm of economics, politics and tribalism, which is not to suggest that Obama is an innocent bystander in his reversal of fortune. It is certainly true that he inherited a capsized economy. But his administration has done little to right the ship. And no president can survive double-digit unemployment and 30,000 foreclosures a month for long.
“But what about Ronald Reagan,” the skeptics are no doubt asking now, “who was saddled with a deep recession in his first term, yet bounced back to win reelection in a landslide?” The difference is epic: Reagan’s poor-performing economy was stalled; Obama’s is broken, and despite all the sanguine media talk of a recovery, the crisis shows no signs of abating anytime soon.
Even before the recession hit, there were more maids, cashiers and waitresses in the United States than factory workers, and, when inflation is accounted for, workers have not had a raise in almost 40 years. The trillions of taxpayer dollars showered on Wall Street has produced record profits and fat bonuses, but has done nothing to loosen clogged credit lines. Lending in October of last year was down nearly 15 percent from the previous year—and the White House refuses to launch a New Deal-like jobs program, or provide any substantive relief to borrowers who are in over their head on mortgages, student loans or credit cards.
According to a recent Bloomberg News poll, only 8 percent of consumers say they plan to spend more in 2010, and with the circulation of cash slowing to a snail’s pace, you don’t need Paul Krugman to answer this question: If nobody’s lending, and nobody’s spending, how does your economy grow?
It doesn’t.
In fact, the economic crisis that is most comparable to the current situation is not the Great Depression, or the 1981 slowdown, but Japan’s decade-long recession that began with the bust of its real-estate bubble in the early ‘90s.
A protracted stagnation will likely produce competing responses from voters in 2012, both of them bad for Obama. Polls show that African Americans continue to overwhelmingly support the president even though the unemployment rate for blacks is nearly twice the national average. That won’t change much, if at all, in the next three years. But will the laid–off African-American workers, who have exhausted their jobless benefits, turn out to vote in Gary, Ind., Detroit, Cleveland, Philly and Tampa with the same enthusiasm, and in the same numbers, as they did in 2008? Black New Yorkers certainly didn’t turn out last year for Bill Thompson, the African-American Democratic mayoral nominee, who lost narrowly to Michael Bloomberg, the Republican incumbent. Voter turnout was the city’s lowest in almost a century.
Conversely, while the economic climate is likely to leave the country’s most reliably liberal voting bloc demoralized and disengaged from an electoral process, this same dispossession has historically energized white, conservatives—particularly when cast in a racial hue. Consider the post-Reconstruction era, or the post-civil rights era, or even South Africa’s Afrikaners who responded to a fiscal crisis by electing the National Party which introduced apartheid in 1948. Today, you can see a populist, scattershot backlash, emerging in the form of the Republican-led “tea-bag” protests, South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson’s heckling of Obama and the rock-star sized crowds generated by Palin’s book tour.
In a Dec. 20 interview with NBC’s Meet The Press, Markos Moulitsas, founder of the liberal blog, the Daily Kos, said that his own polling showed that 86 percent of Republican voters plan on casting ballots in the 2010 midterm elections, compared to 56 percent of Democrats, and 32 percent of African Americans.
On the same show, NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell said: “There’s an anger out there, and I have not seen it since my very first campaign which was George Wallace. There is an angry subtext because of economic dislocation.”
Like the defiant, segregationist Alabama governor, Palin, the former Alaska governor, speaks the language of the white Southern and suburban voters who fear that the American way of life is under attack from an out-of-touch, Godless, effete and multiracial big-city crowd. With her folksy charisma and parochial values, Palin is the latest in a long line of demagogues —from post-Reconstruction governors in the Deep South to Father Coughlin in the ‘30s, from Reagan to Lou Dobbs—who’ve emerged to redeem, or reclaim, the land from Northern carpetbaggers and uppity Negroes.
According to a December Gallup poll, 44 percent of Americans have a favorable view of Palin, an increase of 4 percentage points from October, and narrowing the gap with Obama, whose favorability rating dropped 20 percentage points since his inauguration, to 49 percent.
As the Massachusetts election demonstrates, the problem is not, as much of the media alleges, that Obama and the Democrats have overreached. They haven’t gone far enough. Scott Brown, the Republican candidate in last week’s Massachusetts election, tellingly, made health care “reform” the focus of his triumphant campaign, traveling the state in an old, GM pickup truck, arguing, quite accurately, that the Senate health care plan would cost Americans more money, not less. According to one exit poll, Obama voters who opted for the Republican candidate Scott Brown in Tuesday’s election, said, by a margin of 3-to-2, that the Senate health care proposal “doesn’t go far enough.” Eight of 10 voters in the state continue to want a public option.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Jon Jeter is the author of Flat Broke in the Free Market: How Globalization Fleeced Working People (WW Norton) and the co-author of A Day Late and A Dollar Short: High Hopes and Deferred Dreams in Obama’s “PostRacial America” (John Wiley and Sons).
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/26/us/politics/26budget.html?hp
All,
The abject political confusion, desperate ineptitude, and sheer cowardice that is beginning to characterize the Obama Administration continues to escalate at a dizzying pace. This is what happens when you allow your enemies to dictate on their terms what you should do and how you should do it. This "freeze" is a brazen straightup sellout of the political, economic, and social interests of 95% of the American people. There is no other way to describe it. This blatant capitulation to the right is completely indefensible and a clear indication that we have a President who is currently not prepared or willing to do what needs to be done to change the suicidal direction of this country...
Kofi
January 26, 2010
Obama Seeks Freeze on Many Domestic Programs
By JACKIE CALMES
New York Times
WASHINGTON—President Obama will call for a three-year freeze in spending on many domestic programs, and for increases no greater than inflation after that, an initiative intended to signal his seriousness about cutting the budget deficit, administration officials said Monday.
The officials said the proposal would be a major component both of Mr. Obama’s State of the Union speech on Wednesday and the budget that he will send to Congress next Monday for the fiscal year 2011 that begins in October.
It would cover the agencies and programs for which Congress allocates specific budgets each year, from air traffic control and farm subsidies to education, nutrition and national parks.
But it would exempt the Pentagon, foreign aid, the Veterans Administration and homeland security budgets, as well as the entitlement programs that make up the biggest and fastest-growing part of the federal budget, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
The payoff in budget savings would be small relative to the deficit: The estimated $250 billion in savings over 10 years is less than 5 percent of the $9 trillion to $10 trillion in additional debt the government is expected to accumulate over that time.
The initiative holds political risks as well as potential benefits. Because Mr. Obama exempts military spending while leaving many popular domestic programs vulnerable, his move is certain to further anger liberals in his party, including senior Democrats in Congress, who are already upset by the possible collapse of health care legislation and the troop buildup in Afghanistan, among other things.
But it would signal to voters, Wall Street and other nations that Mr. Obama is willing to make some tough decisions at a time when the deficit and the national debt, in the view of some economists, have reached levels that undermine the nation’s long-term prosperity. Perceptions that government spending is out of control have contributed to Mr. Obama’s loss of support among independent voters, and concern about the government’s fiscal health could put upward pressure on the interest rates the United States has to pay to borrow money from investors and nations, especially China, that have been financing Washington’s budget deficit.
Mr. Obama’s proposal would have to be agreed to by the House and Senate, and it is not clear how much support he will get in an election year when the political appeal of greater fiscal responsibility will be vying with the pressure to provide voters with more and better services. The administration officials said the portion of the budget they have targeted — $447 billion in domestic programs — amounts to a relatively small share, about one-sixth, of the overall federal budget.
But given the raft of agencies and programs within that slice, the reductions will mean a lot of painful reductions that will be fought by numerous lobbies and constituent groups. Also not all programs will be frozen, the administration officials said; many will be cut well below a freeze or eliminated to protect programs that are higher priorities for the administration in education, energy, environmental, health and other areas.
The balancing act of picking winners and losers was evident on Monday at the White House. Mr. Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. outlined a number of new proposals that will be in the budget to help the middle class. They cover issues including child care, student loans and retirement savings.
Administration officials also are working with Congress on roughly $150 billion in additional stimulus spending to spur job creation. But much of that spending would be authorized in the current fiscal year, the administration officials said, so it would not be affected by the proposed freeze that would take effect in the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1.
It is the growth in the so-called entitlement programs — Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security — that is the major factor behind projections of unsustainably high deficits, due to rapidly rising health costs and an aging population.
But one administration official said that limiting the much smaller discretionary domestic budget would have larger symbolic value: It includes spending covering lawmakers’ earmarks for parochial projects, and only when the public believes such perceived waste is being wrung out will they be willing to consider reductions in popular entitlement programs.
“By helping to create a new atmosphere of fiscal discipline, it can actually also feed into debates over other components of the budget,” the official said, briefing reporters on the condition of anonymity.
David M. Herszenhorn contributed reporting from Washington.
Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/23/opinion/23herbert.html?em
All,
Herbert gets it absolutely right in his analysis and the White House, Congress, and the Democratic & Republican parties are completely wrong. Meanwhile the rest of us continue to be victimized by the rapacious corporate state that this country has become...
Kofi
OP-ED COLUMNIST
They Still Don’t Get It
By BOB HERBERT
January 22, 2010
New York Times
How loud do the alarms have to get? There is an economic emergency in the country with millions upon millions of Americans riddled with fear and anxiety as they struggle with long-term joblessness, home foreclosures, personal bankruptcies and dwindling opportunities for themselves and their children.
The door is being slammed on the American dream and the politicians, including the president and his Democratic allies on Capitol Hill, seem not just helpless to deal with the crisis, but completely out of touch with the hardships that have fallen on so many.
While the nation was suffering through the worst economy since the Depression, the Democrats wasted a year squabbling like unruly toddlers over health insurance legislation. No one in his or her right mind could have believed that a workable, efficient, cost-effective system could come out of the monstrously ugly plan that finally emerged from the Senate after long months of shady alliances, disgraceful back-room deals, outlandish payoffs and abject capitulation to the insurance companies and giant pharmaceutical outfits.
The public interest? Forget about it.
With the power elite consumed with its incessant, discordant fiddling over health care, the economic plight of ordinary Americans, from the middle class to the very poor, got pathetically short shrift. And there is no evidence, even now, that leaders of either party fully grasp the depth of the crisis, which began long before the official start of the Great Recession in December 2007.
A new study from the Brookings Institution tells us that the largest and fastest-growing population of poor people in the U.S. is in the suburbs. You don’t hear about this from the politicians who are always so anxious to tell you, in between fund-raisers and photo-ops, what a great job they’re doing. From 2000 to 2008, the number of poor people in the U.S. grew by 5.2 million, reaching nearly 40 million. That represented an increase of 15.4 percent in the poor population, which was more than twice the increase in the population as a whole during that period.
The study does not include data from 2009, when so many millions of families were just hammered by the recession. So the reality is worse than the Brookings figures would indicate.
Job losses, stagnant or reduced wages over the past decade, and the loss of home equity when the housing bubble burst have combined to take a horrendous toll on families who thought they had done all the right things and were living the dream. A great deal of that bleeding is in the suburbs. The study, compiled by the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program, said, “Suburbs gained more than 2.5 million poor individuals, accounting for almost half of the total increase in the nation’s poor population since 2000.”
Democrats in search of clues as to why voters are unhappy may want to take a look at the report. In 2008, a startling 91.6 million people — more than 30 percent of the entire U.S. population — fell below 200 percent of the federal poverty line, which is a meager $21,834 for a family of four.
The question for Democrats is whether there is anything that will wake them up to their obligation to extend a powerful hand to ordinary Americans and help them take the government, including the Supreme Court, back from the big banks, the giant corporations and the myriad other predatory interests that put the value of a dollar high above the value of human beings.
The Democrats still hold the presidency and large majorities in both houses of Congress. The idea that they are not spending every waking hour trying to fix the broken economic system and put suffering Americans back to work is beyond pathetic. Deficit reduction is now the mantra in Washington, which means that new large-scale investments in infrastructure and other measures to ease the employment crisis and jump-start the most promising industries of the 21st century are highly unlikely.
What we’ll get instead is rhetoric. It’s cheap, so we can expect a lot of it.
Those at the bottom of the economic heap seem all but doomed in this environment. The Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston put the matter in stark perspective after analyzing the employment challenges facing young people in Chicago: “Labor market conditions for 16-19 and 20-24-year-olds in the city of Chicago in 2009 are the equivalent of a Great Depression-era, especially for young black men.”
The Republican Party has abandoned any serious approach to the nation’s biggest problems, economic or otherwise. It may be resurgent, but it’s not a serious party. That leaves only the Democrats, a party that once championed working people and the poor, but has long since lost its way.
http://www.ajc.com/news/atlanta/reed-other-mayors-tell-280444.html
All,
What's that old expression about the role of too much water in nature? O yes I remember now: WHEN IT RAINS IT POURS...
Kofi
Reed, other mayors tell Obama: Stimulus isn't working for cities
By Bob Keefe
January 22, 2010
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
WASHINGTON -- As if the White House isn't already hearing it from others, the nation's mayors delivered a clear message to President Barack Obama on Thursday: His economic stimulus program isn't creating enough jobs. "What we said ... was that the method they used for disbursing the first stimulus dollars was wrong," said new Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed, one of more than 200 mayors who met with the president and other administration officials at the White House. "That approach just did not work."
Thursday's meeting between members of the U.S. Conference of Mayors and the White House comes amid signs that -- despite improvement in the nation's economy overall -- the country's cities are still suffering.
A report issued by the mayors' group this week showed the bulk of the nation's unemployed are in cities. It also predicts that most cities won't see a return to pre-recession employment levels until at least 2013. Metro Atlanta is home to about 60 percent of Georgia's unemployed, according to the report. It also shows that Atlanta is among the country's hardest-hit cities economically.
Thursday, Obama sought to reassure mayors that he knows cities need more help.
"While Wall Street may be recovering, you and I know your Main Streets have a long way to go," he told mayors. "Unemployment in your cities is still far too high. And because our metropolitan areas account for 90 percent of our economic output, they are the engines that we need to get started again."
Obama said the budget he will present next month will include new programs and added funding for the nation's cities.
Reed and other mayors want Washington to change the way economic stimulus money and other federal aid are distributed.
About 80 percent of stimulus money has gone directly to state governments, they say. Instead of being used to create new jobs, the bulk of the money has been used to save existing state government jobs -- teachers, law enforcement and others -- and for shoring up sagging state budgets.
If more money would flow directly to cities, the mayors' group contends, it could be used for local improvement projects that would create more jobs.
"Everything is about jobs now," said Burnsville, Minn., Mayor Elizabeth Kautz, president of the mayors' group.
The Democrats' stunning loss in Massachusetts' U.S. Senate race Tuesday reinforced that message.
White House officials indicated the president is receptive to making sure any future jobs creation package or economic stimulus funding adds more emphasis on federal aid to cities.
Reed -- a big Obama supporter in the 2008 election -- said he was encouraged by what he heard Thursday. But, he added, the White House needs to follow through on its promises.
Charleston, S.C., Mayor Joseph Riley, who has been in office 34 years, noted what's at stake: "An economic turnabout like this works itself out not at a national level. It works itself out in the towns and cities of our country."
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/24/opinion/24Rich.html?em
All,
I agree emphatically with every single word of Frank Rich's typically incisive and clear-eyed analysis EXCEPT the very first sentence. Other than that what Rich says here is 100% correct...
Kofi
January 24, 2010
OP-ED COLUMNIST
After the Massachusetts Massacre
By FRANK RICH
New York Times
It was not a referendum on Barack Obama, who in every poll remains one of the most popular politicians in America. It was not a rejection of universal health care, which Massachusetts mandated (with Scott Brown’s State Senate vote) in 2006. It was not a harbinger of a resurgent G.O.P., whose numbers remain in the toilet. Brown had the good sense not to identify himself as a Republican in either his campaign advertising or his victory speech.
And yet Tuesday’s special election was a dire omen for this White House. If the administration sticks to this trajectory, all bets are off for the political future of a president who rode into office blessed with more high hopes, good will and serious promise than any in modern memory. It’s time for him to stop deluding himself. Yes, last week’s political obituaries were ludicrously premature. Obama’s 50-ish percent first-anniversary approval rating matches not just Carter’s but Reagan’s. (Bushes 41 and 43 both skyrocketed in Year One.) Still, minor adjustments can’t right what’s wrong.
Obama’s plight has been unchanged for months. Neither in action nor in message is he in front of the anger roiling a country where high unemployment remains unchecked and spiraling foreclosures are demolishing the bedrock American dream of home ownership. The president is no longer seen as a savior but as a captive of the interests who ginned up the mess and still profit, hugely, from it.
That’s no place for any politician of any party or ideology to be. There’s a reason why the otherwise antithetical Leno and Conan camps are united in their derision of NBC’s titans. A TV network has become a handy proxy for every mismanaged, greedy, disloyal and unaccountable corporation in our dysfunctional economy. It’s a business culture where the rich and well-connected get richer while the employees, shareholders and customers get the shaft. And the conviction that the game is fixed is nonpartisan. If the tea party right and populist left agree on anything, it’s that big bailed-out banks have and will get away with murder while we pay the bill on credit cards — with ever-rising fees.
Politically, no other issue counts. In last weekend’s Washington Post/ABC News poll, 42 percent of Americans chose the economy as the country’s most pressing concern. Only 5 percent picked terrorism, and 2 percent Afghanistan. Obama’s highest approval ratings are now on foreign policy and national security issues — despite the relentless hammering from the Cheney right — but voters don’t care.
Does health care matter? Not as much as you’d think after this yearlong crusade. In the Post/ABC poll, the issue was second-tier — at 24 percent. Obama has blundered, not by positioning himself too far to the left but by landing nowhere — frittering away his political capital by being too vague, too slow and too deferential to Congress. The smartest thing said as the Massachusetts returns came in Tuesday night was by Howard Fineman on MSNBC: “Obama took all his winnings and turned them over to Max Baucus.”
Worse, the master communicator in the White House has still not delivered a coherent message on his signature policy. He not only refused to signal his health care imperatives early on but even now he, like Congressional Democrats, has failed to explain clearly why and how reform relates to economic recovery — or, for that matter, what he wants the final bill to contain. Sure, a president needs political wiggle room as legislative sausage is made, but Scott Brown could and did drive his truck through the wide, wobbly parameters set by Obama.
Ask yourself this: All these months later, do you yet know what the health care plan means for your family’s bottom line, your taxes, your insurance? It’s this nebulousness, magnified by endless Senate versus House squabbling, that has allowed reform to be caricatured by its foes as an impenetrable Rube Goldberg monstrosity, a parody of deficit-ridden big government. Since most voters are understandably confused about what the bills contain, the opponents have been able to attribute any evil they want to Obamacare, from death panels to the death of Medicare, without fear of contradiction.
It’s too late to rewrite that history, but it may not be too late for White House decisiveness. Whatever happens now — good, bad or ugly — must happen fast. Each day Washington spends dickering over health care is another day lost while the election-year economy, stupid, remains intractable for Americans who are suffering.
On the economic front, Obama needs both stylistic and substantive makeovers. He has stepped up the populist rhetoric lately — and markedly after political disaster struck last week — but few find this serene Harvard-trained lawyer credible when slinging populist rhetoric at “fat-cat” bankers. His two principal economic policy makers are useless, if not counterproductive, surrogates. Timothy Geithner, the Treasury secretary, was probably fatally compromised from the moment his tax lapses surfaced; now he is stalked by the pileup of unanswered questions about the still-not-transparent machinations at the New York Fed when he was knee-deep in the A.I.G. bailout. Lawrence Summers, the top administration economic guru, is a symbol of the Clinton-era deregulatory orgy that helped fuel the bubble.
The White House clearly knows this duo is a political albatross. After the news broke that 85,000 more jobs had been lost in December despite some economists’ more optimistic predictions, Christina Romer, a more user-friendly (though still academic) economic hand, was dispatched to the Sunday shows. This is at best a makeshift solution.
Obama needs more independent economists like Paul Volcker, who was hastily retrieved from exile last week after the Massachusetts massacre prompted the White House to tardily embrace his strictures on big banks. Obama also needs economic spokesmen who are not economists and who can authentically speak to life on the ground. Obama must also reconnect. The former community organizer whose credit card was denied at the Hertz counter during the 2000 Democratic convention now spends too much time at the White House presiding over boardroom-table meetings and stiff initiative rollouts instead of engaging with Americans not dressed in business suits.
When it comes to economic substance, small symbolic gestures (the proposed new bank “fee”) won’t cut it. Nor will ineffectual presidential sound bites railing against Wall Street bonuses beyond the federal government’s purview. There’s no chance of a second stimulus. The White House will have to jawbone banks on foreclosures, credit card racketeering and the loosening of credit to small businesses. This means taking on bankers who were among the Obama campaign’s biggest backers and whose lobbyists have castrated regulatory reform by buying off congressmen of both parties. It means pressing for all constitutional remedies that might counter last week’s 5-to-4 Supreme Court decision allowing corporate campaign contributions to buy off even more.
It’s become so easy to pin financial elitism on Democrats that the morning after Brown’s victory the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee had the gall to accuse them of being the “one party who bailed out the automakers and insurance companies.” Never mind that the Bush White House gave us the bank (and A.I.G.) bailouts, or that the G.O.P. is even more in hock than Democrats to corporate patrons. The Obama administration is so overstocked with Goldman Sachs-Robert Rubin alumni and so tainted by its back-room health care deals with pharmaceutical and insurance companies that conservative politicians, Brown included, can masquerade shamelessly as the populist alternative.
Last year the president pointedly studied J.F.K.’s decision-making process on Vietnam while seeking the way forward in Afghanistan. In the end, he didn’t emulate his predecessor and escalated the war. We’ll see how that turns out. Meanwhile, Obama might look at another pivotal moment in the Kennedy presidency — and this time heed the example.
The incident unfolded in April 1962 — some 15 months into the new president’s term — when J.F.K. was infuriated by the U.S. Steel chairman’s decision to break a White House-brokered labor-management contract agreement and raise the price of steel (but not wages). Kennedy was no radical. He hailed from the American elite — like Obama, a product of Harvard, but, unlike Obama, the patrician scion of a wealthy family. And yet he, like that other Harvard patrician, F.D.R., had no hang-ups about battling his own class.
Kennedy didn’t settle for the generic populist rhetoric of Obama’s latest threats to “fight” unspecified bankers some indeterminate day. He instead took the strong action of dressing down U.S. Steel by name. As Richard Reeves writes in his book “President Kennedy,” reporters were left “literally gasping.” The young president called out big steel for threatening “economic recovery and stability” while Americans risked their lives in Southeast Asia. J.F.K. threatened to sic his brother’s Justice Department on corporate records and then held firm as his opponents likened his flex of muscle to the power grabs of Hitler and Mussolini. (Sound familiar?) U.S. Steel capitulated in two days. The Times soon reported on its front page that Kennedy was at “a high point in popular support.”
Can anyone picture Obama exerting such take-no-prisoners leadership to challenge those who threaten our own economic recovery and stability at a time of deep recession and war? That we can’t is a powerful indicator of why what happened in Massachusetts will not stay in Massachusetts if this White House fails to reboot.
Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company
