Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult

Goodbye to All That
by: Mike Lofgren, Truthout | News Analysis
Saturday 3 September 2011

 

Barbara Stanwyck: "We're both rotten!"

Fred MacMurray: "Yeah - only you're a little more rotten." -
"Double Indemnity" (1944) 

Those lines of dialogue from a classic film noir sum up the state of the two political parties in contemporary America. Both parties are rotten - how could they not be, given the complete infestation of the political system by corporate money on a scale that now requires a presidential candidate to raise upwards of a billion dollars to be competitive in the general election? Both parties are captives to corporate loot. The main reason the Democrats' health care bill will be a budget buster once it fully phases in is the Democrats' rank capitulation to corporate interests - no single-payer system, in order to mollify the insurers; and no negotiation of drug prices, a craven surrender to Big Pharma.

But both parties are not rotten in quite the same way. The Democrats have their share of machine politicians, careerists, corporate bagmen, egomaniacs and kooks. Nothing, however, quite matches the modern GOP.

To those millions of Americans who have finally begun paying attention to politics and watched with exasperation the tragicomedy of the debt ceiling extension, it may have come as a shock that the Republican Party is so full of lunatics. To be sure, the party, like any political party on earth, has always had its share of crackpots, like Robert K. Dornan or William E. Dannemeyer. But the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital center today: Steve King, Michele Bachman (now a leading presidential candidate as well), Paul Broun, Patrick McHenry, Virginia Foxx, Louie Gohmert, Allen West. The Congressional directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy.

It was this cast of characters and the pernicious ideas they represent that impelled me to end a nearly 30-year career as a professional staff member on Capitol Hill. A couple of months ago, I retired; but I could see as early as last November that the Republican Party would use the debt limit vote, an otherwise routine legislative procedure that has been used 87 times since the end of World War II, in order to concoct an entirely artificial fiscal crisis. Then, they would use that fiscal crisis to get what they wanted, by literally holding the US and global economies as hostages.

The debt ceiling extension is not the only example of this sort of political terrorism. 

Republicans were willing to lay off 4,000 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) employees, 70,000 private construction workers and let FAA safety inspectors work without pay, in fact, forcing them to pay for their own work-related travel - how prudent is that? - in order to strong arm some union-busting provisions into the FAA reauthorization.

Everyone knows that in a hostage situation, the reckless and amoral actor has the negotiating upper hand over the cautious and responsible actor because the latter is actually concerned about the life of the hostage, while the former does not care. This fact, which ought to be obvious, has nevertheless caused confusion among the professional pundit class, which is mostly still stuck in the Bob Dole era in terms of its orientation. For instance, Ezra Klein wrote of his puzzlement over the fact that while House Republicans essentially won the debt ceiling fight, enough of them were sufficiently dissatisfied that they might still scuttle the deal. Of course they might - the attitude of many freshman Republicans to national default was "bring it on!"

It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe. This trend has several implications, none of them pleasant.

In his Manual of Parliamentary Practice, Thomas Jefferson wrote that it is less important that every rule and custom of a legislature be absolutely justifiable in a theoretical sense, than that they should be generally acknowledged and honored by all parties. These include unwritten rules, customs and courtesies that lubricate the legislative machinery and keep governance a relatively civilized procedure. The US Senate has more complex procedural rules than any other legislative body in the world; many of these rules are contradictory, and on any given day, the Senate parliamentarian may issue a ruling that contradicts earlier rulings on analogous cases.

The only thing that can keep the Senate functioning is collegiality and good faith. During periods of political consensus, for instance, the World War II and early post-war eras, the Senate was a "high functioning" institution: filibusters were rare and the body was legislatively productive. Now, one can no more picture the current Senate producing the original Medicare Act than the old Supreme Soviet having legislated the Bill of Rights.

Far from being a rarity, virtually every bill, every nominee for Senate confirmation and every routine procedural motion is now subject to a Republican filibuster. Under the circumstances, it is no wonder that Washington is gridlocked: legislating has now become war minus the shooting, something one could have observed 80 years ago in the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic. As Hannah Arendt observed, a disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of democratic government to undermine democracy itself.

John P. Judis sums up the modern GOP this way:

"Over the last four decades, the Republican Party has transformed from a loyal opposition into an insurrectionary party that flouts the law when it is in the majority and threatens disorder when it is the minority. It is the party of Watergate and Iran-Contra, but also of the government shutdown in 1995 and the impeachment trial of 1999. If there is an earlier American precedent for today's Republican Party, it is the antebellum Southern Democrats of John Calhoun who threatened to nullify, or disregard, federal legislation they objected to and who later led the fight to secede from the union over slavery."

A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress's generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.

A deeply cynical tactic, to be sure, but a psychologically insightful one that plays on the weaknesses both of the voting public and the news media. There are tens of millions of low-information voters who hardly know which party controls which branch of government, let alone which party is pursuing a particular legislative tactic. These voters' confusion over who did what allows them to form the conclusion that "they are all crooks," and that "government is no good," further leading them to think, "a plague on both your houses" and "the parties are like two kids in a school yard." This ill-informed public cynicism, in its turn, further intensifies the long-term decline in public trust in government that has been taking place since the early 1960s - a distrust that has been stoked by Republican rhetoric at every turn ("Government is the problem," declared Ronald Reagan in 1980).

The media are also complicit in this phenomenon. Ever since the bifurcation of electronic media into a more or less respectable "hard news" segment and a rabidly ideological talk radio and cable TV political propaganda arm, the "respectable" media have been terrified of any criticism for perceived bias. Hence, they hew to the practice of false evenhandedness. Paul Krugman has skewered this tactic as being the "centrist cop-out." "I joked long ago," he says, "that if one party declared that the earth was flat, the headlines would read 'Views Differ on Shape of Planet.'"

Inside-the-Beltway wise guy Chris Cillizza merely proves Krugman right in his Washington Post analysis of "winners and losers" in the debt ceiling impasse. He wrote that the institution of Congress was a big loser in the fracas, which is, of course, correct, but then he opined: "Lawmakers - bless their hearts - seem entirely unaware of just how bad they looked during this fight and will almost certainly spend the next few weeks (or months) congratulating themselves on their tremendous magnanimity." Note how the pundit's ironic deprecation falls like the rain on the just and unjust alike, on those who precipitated the needless crisis and those who despaired of it. He seems oblivious that one side - or a sizable faction of one side - has deliberately attempted to damage the reputation of Congress to achieve its political objectives.

This constant drizzle of "there the two parties go again!" stories out of the news bureaus, combined with the hazy confusion of low-information voters, means that the long-term Republican strategy of undermining confidence in our democratic institutions has reaped electoral dividends. The United States has nearly the lowest voter participation among Western democracies; this, again, is a consequence of the decline of trust in government institutions - if government is a racket and both parties are the same, why vote? And if the uninvolved middle declines to vote, it increases the electoral clout of a minority that is constantly being whipped into a lather by three hours daily of Rush Limbaugh or Fox News. There were only 44 million Republican voters in the 2010 mid-term elections, but they effectively canceled the political results of the election of President Obama by 69 million voters.

This tactic of inducing public distrust of government is not only cynical, it is schizophrenic. For people who profess to revere the Constitution, it is strange that they so caustically denigrate the very federal government that is the material expression of the principles embodied in that document. This is not to say that there is not some theoretical limit to the size or intrusiveness of government; I would be the first to say there are such limits, both fiscal and Constitutional. But most Republican officeholders seem strangely uninterested in the effective repeal of Fourth Amendment protections by the Patriot Act, the weakening of habeas corpus and self-incrimination protections in the public hysteria following 9/11 or the unpalatable fact that the United States has the largest incarcerated population of any country on earth. If anything, they would probably opt for more incarcerated persons, as imprisonment is a profit center for the prison privatization industry, which is itself a growth center for political contributions to these same politicians.[1] Instead, they prefer to rail against those government programs that actually help people. And when a program is too popular to attack directly, like Medicare or Social Security, they prefer to undermine it by feigning an agonized concern about the deficit. That concern, as we shall see, is largely fictitious.

Undermining Americans' belief in their own institutions of self-government remains a prime GOP electoral strategy. But if this technique falls short of producing Karl Rove's dream of 30 years of unchallengeable one-party rule (as all such techniques always fall short of achieving the angry and embittered true believer's New Jerusalem), there are other even less savory techniques upon which to fall back. Ever since Republicans captured the majority in a number of state legislatures last November, they have systematically attempted to make it more difficult to vote: by onerous voter ID requirements (in Wisconsin, Republicans have legislated photo IDs while simultaneously shutting Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) offices in Democratic constituencies while at the same time lengthening the hours of operation of DMV offices in GOP constituencies); by narrowing registration periods; and by residency requirements that may disenfranchise university students.

This legislative assault is moving in a diametrically opposed direction to 200 years of American history, when the arrow of progress pointed toward more political participation by more citizens. Republicans are among the most shrill in self-righteously lecturing other countries about the wonders of democracy; exporting democracy (albeit at the barrel of a gun) to the Middle East was a signature policy of the Bush administration. But domestically, they don't want those people voting.

You can probably guess who those people are. Above all, anyone not likely to vote Republican. As Sarah Palin would imply, the people who are not Real Americans. Racial minorities. Immigrants. Muslims. Gays. Intellectuals. Basically, anyone who doesn't look, think, or talk like the GOP base. This must account, at least to some degree, for their extraordinarily vitriolic hatred of President Obama. I have joked in the past that the main administration policy that Republicans object to is Obama's policy of being black.[2] Among the GOP base, there is constant harping about somebody else, some "other," who is deliberately, assiduously and with malice aforethought subverting the Good, the True and the Beautiful: Subversives. Commies. Socialists. Ragheads. Secular humanists. Blacks. Fags. Feminazis. The list may change with the political needs of the moment, but they always seem to need a scapegoat to hate and fear.

It is not clear to me how many GOP officeholders believe this reactionary and paranoid claptrap. I would bet that most do not. But they cynically feed the worst instincts of their fearful and angry low-information political base with a nod and a wink. During the disgraceful circus of the "birther" issue, Republican politicians subtly stoked the fires of paranoia by being suggestively equivocal - "I take the president at his word" - while never unambiguously slapping down the myth. John Huntsman was the first major GOP figure forthrightly to refute the birther calumny - albeit after release of the birth certificate.

I do not mean to place too much emphasis on racial animus in the GOP. While it surely exists, it is also a fact that Republicans think that no Democratic president could conceivably be legitimate. Republicans also regarded Bill Clinton as somehow, in some manner, twice fraudulently elected (well do I remember the elaborate conspiracy theories that Republicans traded among themselves). Had it been Hillary Clinton, rather than Barack Obama, who had been elected in 2008, I am certain we would now be hearing, in lieu of the birther myths, conspiracy theories about Vince Foster's alleged murder.

The reader may think that I am attributing Svengali-like powers to GOP operatives able to manipulate a zombie base to do their bidding. It is more complicated than that. Historical circumstances produced the raw material: the deindustrialization and financialization of America since about 1970 has spawned an increasingly downscale white middle class - without job security (or even without jobs), with pensions and health benefits evaporating and with their principal asset deflating in the collapse of the housing bubble. Their fears are not imaginary; their standard of living is shrinking.

What do the Democrats offer these people? Essentially nothing. Democratic Leadership Council-style "centrist" Democrats were among the biggest promoters of disastrous trade deals in the 1990s that outsourced jobs abroad: NAFTA, World Trade Organization, permanent most-favored-nation status for China. At the same time, the identity politics/lifestyle wing of the Democratic Party was seen as a too illegal immigrant-friendly by downscaled and outsourced whites.[3]

While Democrats temporized, or even dismissed the fears of the white working class as racist or nativist, Republicans went to work. To be sure, the business wing of the Republican Party consists of the most energetic outsourcers, wage cutters and hirers of sub-minimum wage immigrant labor to be found anywhere on the globe. But the faux-populist wing of the party, knowing the mental compartmentalization that occurs in most low-information voters, played on the fears of that same white working class to focus their anger on scapegoats that do no damage to corporations' bottom lines: instead of raising the minimum wage, let's build a wall on the Southern border (then hire a defense contractor to incompetently manage it). Instead of predatory bankers, it's evil Muslims. Or evil gays. Or evil abortionists.

How do they manage to do this? Because Democrats ceded the field. Above all, they do not understand language. Their initiatives are posed in impenetrable policy-speak: the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The what? - can anyone even remember it? No wonder the pejorative "Obamacare" won out. Contrast that with the Republicans' Patriot Act. You're a patriot, aren't you? Does anyone at the GED level have a clue what a Stimulus Bill is supposed to be? Why didn't the White House call it the Jobs Bill and keep pounding on that theme?

You know that Social Security and Medicare are in jeopardy when even Democrats refer to them as entitlements. "Entitlement" has a negative sound in colloquial English: somebody who is "entitled" selfishly claims something he doesn't really deserve. Why not call them "earned benefits," which is what they are because we all contribute payroll taxes to fund them? That would never occur to the Democrats. Republicans don't make that mistake; they are relentlessly on message: it is never the "estate tax," it is the "death tax." Heaven forbid that the Walton family should give up one penny of its $86-billion fortune. All of that lucre is necessary to ensure that unions be kept out of Wal-Mart, that women employees not be promoted and that politicians be kept on a short leash.

It was not always thus. It would have been hard to find an uneducated farmer during the depression of the 1890s who did not have a very accurate idea about exactly which economic interests were shafting him. An unemployed worker in a breadline in 1932 would have felt little gratitude to the Rockefellers or the Mellons. But that is not the case in the present economic crisis. After a riot of unbridled greed such as the world has not seen since the conquistadors' looting expeditions and after an unprecedented broad and rapid transfer of wealth upward by Wall Street and its corporate satellites, where is the popular anger directed, at least as depicted in the media? At "Washington spending" - which has increased primarily to provide unemployment compensation, food stamps and Medicaid to those economically damaged by the previous decade's corporate saturnalia. Or the popular rage is harmlessly diverted against pseudo-issues: death panels, birtherism, gay marriage, abortion, and so on, none of which stands to dent the corporate bottom line in the slightest.

Thus far, I have concentrated on Republican tactics, rather than Republican beliefs, but the tactics themselves are important indicators of an absolutist, authoritarian mindset that is increasingly hostile to the democratic values of reason, compromise and conciliation. Rather, this mindset seeks polarizing division (Karl Rove has been very explicit that this is his principal campaign strategy), conflict and the crushing of opposition.

As for what they really believe, the Republican Party of 2011 believes in three principal tenets I have laid out below. The rest of their platform one may safely dismiss as window dressing:

1. The GOP cares solely and exclusively about its rich contributors. The party has built a whole catechism on the protection and further enrichment of America's plutocracy. Their caterwauling about deficit and debt is so much eyewash to con the public. Whatever else President Obama has accomplished (and many of his purported accomplishments are highly suspect), his $4-trillion deficit reduction package did perform the useful service of smoking out Republican hypocrisy. The GOP refused, because it could not abide so much as a one-tenth of one percent increase on the tax rates of the Walton family or the Koch brothers, much less a repeal of the carried interest rule that permits billionaire hedge fund managers to pay income tax at a lower effective rate than cops or nurses. Republicans finally settled on a deal that had far less deficit reduction - and even less spending reduction! - than Obama's offer, because of their iron resolution to protect at all costs our society's overclass.

Republicans have attempted to camouflage their amorous solicitude for billionaires with a fog of misleading rhetoric. John Boehner is fond of saying, "we won't raise anyone's taxes," as if the take-home pay of an Olive Garden waitress were inextricably bound up with whether Warren Buffett pays his capital gains as ordinary income or at a lower rate. Another chestnut is that millionaires and billionaires are "job creators." US corporations have just had their most profitable quarters in history; Apple, for one, is sitting on $76 billion in cash, more than the GDP of most countries. So, where are the jobs?

Another smokescreen is the "small business" meme, since standing up for Mom's and Pop's corner store is politically more attractive than to be seen shilling for a megacorporation. Raising taxes on the wealthy will kill small business' ability to hire; that is the GOP dirge every time Bernie Sanders or some Democrat offers an amendment to increase taxes on incomes above $1 million. But the number of small businesses that have a net annual income over a million dollars is de minimis, if not by definition impossible (as they would no longer be small businesses). And as data from the Center for Economic and Policy Research have shown, small businesses account for only 7.2 percent of total US employment, a significantly smaller share of total employment than in most Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries.

Likewise, Republicans have assiduously spread the myth that Americans are conspicuously overtaxed. But compared to other OECD countries, the effective rates of US taxation are among the lowest. In particular, they point to the top corporate income rate of 35 percent as being confiscatory Bolshevism. But again, the effective rate is much lower. Did GE pay 35 percent on 2010 profits of $14 billion? No, it paid zero.

When pressed, Republicans make up misleading statistics to "prove" that the America's fiscal burden is being borne by the rich and the rest of us are just freeloaders who don't appreciate that fact. "Half of Americans don't pay taxes" is a perennial meme. But what they leave out is that that statement refers to federal income taxes. There are millions of people who don't pay income taxes, but do contribute payroll taxes - among the most regressive forms of taxation. But according to GOP fiscal theology, payroll taxes don't count. Somehow, they have convinced themselves that since payroll taxes go into trust funds, they're not real taxes. Likewise, state and local sales taxes apparently don't count, although their effect on a poor person buying necessities like foodstuffs is far more regressive than on a millionaire.

All of these half truths and outright lies have seeped into popular culture via the corporate-owned business press. Just listen to CNBC for a few hours and you will hear most of them in one form or another. More important politically, Republicans' myths about taxation have been internalized by millions of economically downscale "values voters," who may have been attracted to the GOP for other reasons (which I will explain later), but who now accept this misinformation as dogma.

And when misinformation isn't enough to sustain popular support for the GOP's agenda, concealment is needed. One fairly innocuous provision in the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill requires public companies to make a more transparent disclosure of CEO compensation, including bonuses. Note that it would not limit the compensation, only require full disclosure. Republicans are hell-bent on repealing this provision. Of course; it would not serve Wall Street interests if the public took an unhealthy interest in the disparity of their own incomes as against that of a bank CEO. As Spencer Bachus, the Republican chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, says, "In Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated and my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks."

2. They worship at the altar of Mars.  While the me-too Democrats have set a horrible example of keeping up with the Joneses with respect to waging wars, they can never match GOP stalwarts such as John McCain or Lindsey Graham in their sheer, libidinous enthusiasm for invading other countries. McCain wanted to mix it up with Russia - a nuclear-armed state - during the latter's conflict with Georgia in 2008 (remember? - "we are all Georgians now," a slogan that did not, fortunately, catch on), while Graham has been persistently agitating for attacks on Iran and intervention in Syria. And these are not fringe elements of the party; they are the leading "defense experts," who always get tapped for the Sunday talk shows. About a month before Republicans began holding a gun to the head of the credit markets to get trillions of dollars of cuts, these same Republicans passed a defense appropriations bill that increased spending by $17 billion over the prior year's defense appropriation. To borrow Chris Hedges' formulation, war is the force that gives meaning to their lives.

A cynic might conclude that this militaristic enthusiasm is no more complicated than the fact that Pentagon contractors spread a lot of bribery money around Capitol Hill. That is true, but there is more to it than that. It is not necessarily even the fact that members of Congress feel they are protecting constituents' jobs. The wildly uneven concentration of defense contracts and military bases nationally means that some areas, like Washington, DC, and San Diego, are heavily dependent on Department of Defense (DOD) spending. But there are many more areas of the country whose net balance is negative: the citizenry pays more in taxes to support the Pentagon than it receives back in local contracts.

And the economic justification for Pentagon spending is even more fallacious when one considers that the $700 billion annual DOD budget creates comparatively few jobs. The days of Rosie the Riveter are long gone; most weapons projects now require very little touch labor. Instead, a disproportionate share is siphoned off into high-cost research and development (from which the civilian economy benefits little); exorbitant management expenditures, overhead and out-and-out padding; and, of course, the money that flows back into the coffers of political campaigns. A million dollars appropriated for highway construction would create two to three times as many jobs as a million dollars appropriated for Pentagon weapons procurement, so the jobs argument is ultimately specious.

Take away the cash nexus and there still remains a psychological predisposition toward war and militarism on the part of the GOP. This undoubtedly arises from a neurotic need to demonstrate toughness and dovetails perfectly with the belligerent tough-guy pose one constantly hears on right-wing talk radio. Militarism springs from the same psychological deficit that requires an endless series of enemies, both foreign and domestic.

The results of the last decade of unbridled militarism and the Democrats' cowardly refusal to reverse it [4], have been disastrous both strategically and fiscally. It has made the United States less prosperous, less secure and less free. Unfortunately, the militarism and the promiscuous intervention it gives rise to are only likely to abate when the Treasury is exhausted, just as it happened to the Dutch Republic and the British Empire.

3. Give me that old time religion. Pandering to fundamentalism is a full-time vocation in the GOP. Beginning in the 1970s, religious cranks ceased simply to be a minor public nuisance in this country and grew into the major element of the Republican rank and file. Pat Robertson's strong showing in the 1988 Iowa Caucus signaled the gradual merger of politics and religion in the party. The results are all around us: if the American people poll more like Iranians or Nigerians than Europeans or Canadians on questions of evolution versus creationism, scriptural inerrancy, the existence of angels and demons, and so forth, that result is due to the rise of the religious right, its insertion into the public sphere by the Republican Party and the consequent normalizing of formerly reactionary or quaint beliefs. Also around us is a prevailing anti-intellectualism and hostility to science; it is this group that defines "low-information voter" - or, perhaps, "misinformation voter."

The Constitution to the contrary notwithstanding, there is now a de facto religious test for the presidency: major candidates are encouraged (or coerced) to "share their feelings" about their "faith" in a revelatory speech; or, some televangelist like Rick Warren dragoons the candidates (as he did with Obama and McCain in 2008) to debate the finer points of Christology, with Warren himself, of course, as the arbiter. Politicized religion is also the sheet anchor of the culture wars. But how did the whole toxic stew of GOP beliefs - economic royalism, militarism and culture wars cum fundamentalism - come completely to displace an erstwhile civilized Eisenhower Republicanism?

It is my view that the rise of politicized religious fundamentalism (which is a subset of the decline of rational problem solving in America) may have been the key ingredient of the takeover of the Republican Party. For politicized religion provides a substrate of beliefs that rationalizes - at least in the minds of followers - all three of the GOP's main tenets.

Televangelists have long espoused the health-and-wealth/name-it-and-claim it gospel. If you are wealthy, it is a sign of God's favor. If not, too bad! But don't forget to tithe in any case. This rationale may explain why some economically downscale whites defend the prerogatives of billionaires.

The GOP's fascination with war is also connected with the fundamentalist mindset. The Old Testament abounds in tales of slaughter - God ordering the killing of the Midianite male infants and enslavement of the balance of the population, the divinely-inspired genocide of the Canaanites, the slaying of various miscreants with the jawbone of an ass - and since American religious fundamentalist seem to prefer the Old Testament to the New (particularly that portion of the New Testament known as the Sermon on the Mount), it is but a short step to approving war as a divinely inspired mission. This sort of thinking has led, inexorably, to such phenomena as Jerry Falwell once writing that God is Pro-War.

It is the apocalyptic frame of reference of fundamentalists, their belief in an imminent Armageddon, that psychologically conditions them to steer this country into conflict, not only on foreign fields (some evangelicals thought Saddam was the Antichrist and therefore a suitable target for cruise missiles), but also in the realm of domestic political controversy. It is hardly surprising that the most adamant proponent of the view that there was no debt ceiling problem was Michele Bachmann, the darling of the fundamentalist right. What does it matter, anyway, if the country defaults? - we shall presently abide in the bosom of the Lord.

Some liberal writers have opined that the different socio-economic perspectives separating the "business" wing of the GOP and the religious right make it an unstable coalition that could crack. I am not so sure. There is no fundamental disagreement on which direction the two factions want to take the country, merely how far in that direction they want to take it. 

The plutocrats would drag us back to the Gilded Age, the theocrats to the Salem witch trials. In any case, those consummate plutocrats, the Koch brothers, are pumping large sums of money into Michele Bachman's presidential campaign, so one ought not make too much of a potential plutocrat-theocrat split.

Thus, the modern GOP; it hardly seems conceivable that a Republican could have written the following:

"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid." (That was President Eisenhower, writing to his brother Edgar in 1954.)

It is this broad and ever-widening gulf between the traditional Republicanism of an Eisenhower and the quasi-totalitarian cult of a Michele Bachmann that impelled my departure from Capitol Hill. It is not in my pragmatic nature to make a heroic gesture of self-immolation, or to make lurid revelations of personal martyrdom in the manner of David Brock. And I will leave a more detailed dissection of failed Republican economic policies to my fellow apostate Bruce Bartlett.

I left because I was appalled at the headlong rush of Republicans, like Gadarene swine, to embrace policies that are deeply damaging to this country's future; and contemptuous of the feckless, craven incompetence of Democrats in their half-hearted attempts to stop them. And, in truth, I left as an act of rational self-interest. Having gutted private-sector pensions and health benefits as a result of their embrace of outsourcing, union busting and "shareholder value," the GOP now thinks it is only fair that public-sector workers give up their pensions and benefits, too. Hence the intensification of the GOP's decades-long campaign of scorn against government workers. Under the circumstances, it is simply safer to be a current retiree rather than a prospective one.

If you think Paul Ryan and his Ayn Rand-worshipping colleagues aren't after your Social Security and Medicare, I am here to disabuse you of your naiveté.[5] They will move heaven and earth to force through tax cuts that will so starve the government of revenue that they will be "forced" to make "hard choices" - and that doesn't mean repealing those very same tax cuts, it means cutting the benefits for which you worked.

During the week that this piece was written, the debt ceiling fiasco reached its conclusion. The economy was already weak, but the GOP's disgraceful game of chicken roiled the markets even further. Foreigners could hardly believe it: Americans' own crazy political actions were destabilizing the safe-haven status of the dollar. Accordingly, during that same week, over one trillion dollars worth of assets evaporated on financial markets. Russia and China have stepped up their advocating that the dollar be replaced as the global reserve currency - a move as consequential and disastrous for US interests as any that can be imagined.

If Republicans have perfected a new form of politics that is successful electorally at the same time that it unleashes major policy disasters, it means twilight both for the democratic process and America's status as the world's leading power.

Footnotes:

[1] I am not exaggerating for effect. A law passed in 2010 by the Arizona legislature mandating arrest and incarceration of suspected illegal aliens was actually drafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative business front group that drafts "model" legislation on behalf of its corporate sponsors. The draft legislation in question was written for the private prison lobby, which sensed a growth opportunity in imprisoning more people.

[2] I am not a supporter of Obama and object to a number of his foreign and domestic policies. But when he took office amid the greatest financial collapse in 80 years, I wanted him to succeed, so that the country I served did not fail. But already in 2009, Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, declared that his greatest legislative priority was - jobs for Americans? Rescuing the financial system? Solving the housing collapse? - no, none of those things. His top priority was to ensure that Obama should be a one-term president. Evidently Senator McConnell hates Obama more than he loves his country. Note that the mainstream media have lately been hailing McConnell as "the adult in the room," presumably because he is less visibly unstable than the Tea Party freshmen

[3] This is not a venue for immigrant bashing. It remains a fact that outsourcing jobs overseas, while insourcing sub-minimum wage immigrant labor, will exert downward pressure on US wages. The consequence will be popular anger, and failure to address that anger will result in a downward wage spiral and a breech of the social compact, not to mention a rise in nativism and other reactionary impulses. It does no good to claim that these economic consequences are an inevitable result of globalization; Germany has somehow managed to maintain a high-wage economy and a vigorous industrial base.

[4] The cowardice is not merely political. During the past ten years, I have observed that Democrats are actually growing afraid of Republicans. In a quirky and flawed, but insightful, little book, Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred, John Lukacs concludes that the left fears, the right hates.

[5] The GOP cult of Ayn Rand is both revealing and mystifying. On the one hand, Rand's tough guy, every-man-for-himself posturing is a natural fit because it puts a philosophical gloss on the latent sociopathy so prevalent among the hard right. On the other, Rand exclaimed at every opportunity that she was a militant atheist who felt nothing but contempt for Christianity. Apparently, the ignorance of most fundamentalist "values voters" means that GOP candidates who enthuse over Rand at the same time they thump their Bibles never have to explain this stark contradiction. And I imagine a Democratic officeholder would have a harder time explaining why he named his offspring "Marx" than a GOP incumbent would in rationalizing naming his kid "Rand."

GOP to Fed: Let Economy Fail (2 articles)

by Stan Collender/Campaign for America's Future  

Friday 23 September 2011

The headline above is not what GOP congressional leaders actually said to Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke, but they might just as well have used that precise language in the letter CNBC reports they sent to the Fed.  According to CNBC, the letter instructed the Fed "to refrain from further 'intervention' in the economy.

In other words, now that the GOP has made it all but impossible for fiscal policy to be used to improve they economy, they want to make sure that the only other tool the government has at its disposal -- monetary policy -- isn't used either. 

Why take on the Fed?  The Republicans have some direct control over fiscal policy because they can either refuse to consider a proposal in the House where they are in the majority or can filibuster legislation in the Senate where they are in the minority.  Because the Fed is an independent agency, the GOP can only do what they did today in the letter by threatening to bring down the wrath of god if it dares take any action to get the economy moving.

If you're surprised by this you haven't been reading CG&G.  I first posted back in August 2010 that Bernanke had "painted a big bulls eye on the Federal Reserve" when he spoke at the annual conference in Jackson, Wyoming, about the Fed providing additional stimulus if the economy needs it.  My exact words were:

It’s not at all clear, however, whether Bernanke realizes that the same political pressure that has brought fiscal policy to a standstill in Washington is very likely to be applied to the Fed if it decides to move forward. With Republican policymakers seeing economic hardship as the path to election glory this November, there is every reason to expect that the GOP will be equally as opposed to any actions taken by the Federal Reserve that would make the economy better, and that Republicans will openly and virulently criticize the Fed for even thinking about it. The criticism is likely to come both before any action is taken to try to stop it from happening and afterwards to make the Fed think twice about doing more.

Three months later, I referred back to that exact post when a number of GOP economists and political strategists began to criticize the Fed exactly as predicted.

Today's letter is far worse than anything that happened last November.  This warning is directly from the Republican congressional leadership instead of just outside economists and strategists, and the letter is almost sinister and ominous in its tone.  The treat that terrible things will come to those who help the economy when the GOP is not in charge of the White House sounds very real.

My question: If Rick Perry -- one of the wanna-be GOP candidates for president -- says that Bernanke's actions to date have been treasonous, what do you call today's Republican demand that the federal agency with the legal responsibility and the potential power to help GDP grow and unemployment to fall not do anything to help the American economy?

BS is the mildest term I can think of for this situation.

+++++++++++

GOP Leaders Warn Bernanke About Further Fed Action
Reuters | 20 Sep 2011 |CNBC

Top Congressional Republicans Tuesday took the unusual step of telling the Federal Reserve to refrain from further "intervention'' in the economy on the eve of a policy decision by the U.S. central bank.

The group, which included the top two Republicans in both houses of Congress, said the Fed's policies have been ineffective at supporting economic expansion and boosting employment.

"It is not clear that the recent round of quantitative easing undertaken by the Federal Reserve has facilitated economic growth or reduced the unemployment rate,'' the group said in a letter to Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke.

The letter was signed by House Speaker John Boehner, Majority Leader Eric Cantor, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl. 

It was a rare direct recommendation from Capitol Hill on monetary policy, which is supposed to be conducted free of political pressure. 

The Fed said it had received the letter, which was made public by Republican leaders, but had no further comment. 

With economic prospects fading dramatically after a damaging U.S. debt downgrade in August and an escalation of European financial turmoil, the Fed has made clear it is intent on taking further steps to lift growth. 

Fed officials argue that, while growth remains anemic, its unconventional monetary support have at least forestalled a prolonged period of damaging deflation. 

Officials at the central bank differ on how best to address the economy's woes, analysts expect Bernanke to muster a consensus behind a plan to rebalance the Fed's portfolio to push down longer-term interest rates. 

Officials hope that by weighting the central bank's bond holdings more heavily toward longer-term debt they can spur mortgage refinancings and push investors into stocks or corporate bonds and away from safe-haven Treasuries. 

But with interest rates already effectively at zero and unemployment still above 9 percent, Republicans said the risks of unorthodox policy were too great. 

"We have serious concerns that further intervention by the Federal Reserve could exacerbate current problems or further harm the U.S. economy," the letter said. 

Republican leaders were deeply critical of the Fed's move late last year to make additional bond purchases, and blocked a nominee to the Fed's board earlier this year. The nominee, Peter Diamond, had voiced support for the Fed's easy-money policies. 

Indeed, the Fed has become a political campaign issue ahead of next year's presidential elections, with Mitt Romney from Massachusetts saying he would not reappoint Bernanke and Texas Republican Rick Perry calling the Fed chief's actions "treasonous." 

"If this guy prints more money between now and the election, I don't know what y'all will do to him in Iowa, but we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas," Perry told supporters in Iowa last month. 

Today's Conservatives Say It Out Loud: They Hate Democracy

by: Dave Johnson, Campaign for America's Future | Op-Ed

Friday 23 September 2011

The roots of today's toxic conservative movement lie in Ayn Rand's teaching that wealthy "producers" -- now called "job creators" -- should be left alone by the government, namely the rest of us. The rest of us are "freeloaders," "moochers," "leeches" and "parasites" who feed off these producers and who shouldn't be allowed to make decisions to collect taxes from them or regulate them or interfere in most other ways. The Randians hate democracy, and say so, declaring that "collectivism" sacrifices individual rights to majority wishes.

(See Concern Over Republican Embrace Of The Ayn Rand Poison.)

For decades these selfish, childish, "you can't make me" beliefs stayed largely below the radar, because conservatives understood that voicing them in public risked alienating ... well, anyone with any sense at all. But for various reasons sense has departed the country and conservatives are finally saying it out loud, for everyone to hear: they hate democracy. They want to limit the country's decision-making and the rewards of our society and economy to those they feel "deserve" to be on top, namely the "producers" and "job-creators."

Writing in Registering the Poor to Vote is Un-American conservative columnist Matthew Vadum reflects these views, writing that democracy is "like handing out burglary tools to criminals." He writes,

It is profoundly antisocial and un-American to empower the nonproductive segments of the population to destroy the country -- which is precisely why Barack Obama zealously supports registering welfare recipients to vote.

A decade before the Motor-Voter law that required states to register voters at welfare offices was enacted, NAACP official Joe Madison explained the political economy of voter registration drives. "When people are standing in line to get cheese and butter or unemployment compensation, you don't have to tell them how to vote," said Madison, now a radio talk show host in Washington, D.C. "They know how to vote."

Vadum echoes the Randian ideology that we should be government by the "producer" supermen, and the parasites (the rest of us) should have no say in this, calling it communism:

Encouraging those who burden society to participate in elections isn't about helping the poor. It's about helping the poor to help themselves to others' money. It's about raw so-called social justice. It's about moving America ever farther away from the small-government ideals of the Founding Fathers.

Registering the unproductive to vote is an idea that was heavily promoted by the small-c communists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, as I write in my new book, Subversion Inc.: How Obama's ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers.

Thom Hartmann talks on his TV show with Vadum about this:

In response, conservative outlets like FOX News have been giving Vadum a platform to repeat his views to large numbers of people:

Other Conservatives Weigh In

Vadum's perspective are not unique in conservative circles. Rush Limbaugh has questioned on the air whether poor people should be allowed to vote. Judson Phillips, president of Tea Party Nation thinks voting should be limited to those who "own property."

Other conservatives are also on the record as opposing democracy. Walter Williams, in Democracy Versus Liberty, writes, "I find democracy and majority rule a contemptible form of government." He echoes the old "taxes are theft" line, writing, "Laws do not represent reason. They represent force."

Pat Buchanan picks up the baton and mocks democracy, calling it a "childlike faith," and laments the downfall of a corrupt tyrant, in The Democracy Worshipers,

...Hosni Mubarak, though a ruthless ruler, had been our man in Cairo since the assassination of Anwar Sadat, fighting alongside us in the Gulf War, keeping the peace with Israel, allying with us in the war on terror.

But as soon as the tide turned against him, we ditched him and cheered on the crowd in Tahrir Square, a few of whom celebrated the downfall of despotism with a sexual mauling of Lara Logan.

Some Good Points

Earlier this year, writing at the Cato Institute, Senior Fellow Steve H. Hanke offers a more nuanced view of democracy's failings, in, On Democracy Versus Liberty Mr. Hanke makes very good points about the tendencies of the public to be steered toward bad decisions by panic during crisis. "The result is that crises acted as a ratchet, shifting the trend line of government size and scope up to a higher level." Later, he equates the power of organized wealth (Cato's funders, anyone???) to influence lawmakers with the problems of majority rule! He uses examples including farmers continuing to receive subsidies long after the depression ended, and the Bush-era expansion of government in response to 9/11.

But Hanke fails to see that it is not democracy that causes these distortions, but the failure of our system to keep the power of concentrated wealth from shouting down the collected wisdom of the people. It is the suppression of democracy that causes the very problems Henke attributes to democracy.

Republican War On Voting

Today in several states Republicans are making it harder to vote. In The Next Voting Rights Movement Must Start Now, CAF's Isaiah J. Poole warns,

In state after state, new hurdles, such as voter ID laws, are being constructed to the right to vote that will especially trip up low-income people, students, rural residents and seniors. They disproportionately affect many of the groups who helped put Barack Obama in the White House in 2008 and who are in the vanguard of opposition to right-wing economic policies today. This disenfranchisement is largely happening below the radar of a populace and a national media preoccupied with the poor state of the economy and with the series of attacks by governors on public employee unions.

Ari Berman, in The GOP War on Voting at Rolling Stone,

As the nation gears up for the 2012 presidential election, Republican officials have launched an unprecedented, centrally coordinated campaign to suppress the elements of the Democratic vote that elected Barack Obama in 2008. Just as Dixiecrats once used poll taxes and literacy tests to bar black Southerners from voting, a new crop of GOP governors and state legislators has passed a series of seemingly disconnected measures that could prevent millions of students, minorities, immigrants, ex-convicts and the elderly from casting ballots.

. . . In a systematic campaign orchestrated by the American Legislative Exchange Council – and funded in part by David and Charles Koch, the billionaire brothers who bankrolled the Tea Party – 38 states introduced legislation this year designed to impede voters at every step of the electoral process.

All told, a dozen states have approved new obstacles to voting. Kansas and Alabama now require would-be voters to provide proof of citizenship before registering. Florida and Texas made it harder for groups like the League of Women Voters to register new voters. Maine repealed Election Day voter registration, which had been on the books since 1973. Five states – Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Tennessee and West Virginia – cut short their early voting periods. Florida and Iowa barred all ex-felons from the polls, disenfranchising thousands of previously eligible voters. And six states controlled by Republican governors and legislatures – Alabama, Kansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin – will require voters to produce a government-issued ID before casting ballots. More than 10 percent of U.S. citizens lack such identification, and the numbers are even higher among constituencies that traditionally lean Democratic – including 18 percent of young voters and 25 percent of African-Americans.

Taken together, such measures could significantly dampen the Democratic turnout next year – perhaps enough to shift the outcome in favor of the GOP.

In Taking Back The Vote, CAF's Terrance Heath writes about the Republican war on voting,

If tea party conservatives have their way, the right to vote will revert back to a privilege — and one enjoyed by far fewer people. It's easy to dismiss media motormouths like Ann Coulter, when she says that women should not have the right to vote, because too many of them vote Democratic (single women, anyway). But it's a mistake to shrug off someone like Tea Party Nation President Judson Phillips, who thinks it would be a good idea to put "certain restrictions on the right to vote," like restricting voting to property owners.

Phillips' claim is reminiscent of Republican attempts to use a list of foreclosed homes to block people from voting in the 2008 election in states like Michigan and Ohio. When right-wing pundits like Matthew Vadum(author of the ACORN "exposé" Subversion, Inc.) and Rush Limbaugh say that the poor shouldn't have the right to vote, they're expressing the same sentiment. It's a manifestation of the conservative concern that too many of the "wrong people" have too much of a voice in politics, and too few of the "right people" have any. That's what Paul Weyrich meant when he said to a group of evangelical activists in 1980: "I don't want everybody to vote. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down."

Undermining Democracy On Purpose

We are not dealing with the Republican Party we used to know. This is not even George W. Bush's Republican party anymore. In Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult, retiring Republican Congressional staffer Mike Lofgren writes,

Far from being a rarity, virtually every bill, every nominee for Senate confirmation and every routine procedural motion is now subject to a Republican filibuster. Under the circumstances, it is no wonder that Washington is gridlocked: legislating has now become war minus the shooting, something one could have observed 80 years ago in the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic. As Hannah Arendt observed, a disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of democratic government to undermine democracy itself.

[. . .] A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress's generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.

A deeply cynical tactic, to be sure, but a psychologically insightful one that plays on the weaknesses both of the voting public and the news media. There are tens of millions of low-information voters who hardly know which party controls which branch of government, let alone which party is pursuing a particular legislative tactic. These voters' confusion over who did what allows them to form the conclusion that "they are all crooks," and that "government is no good," further leading them to think, "a plague on both your houses" and "the parties are like two kids in a school yard." This ill-informed public cynicism, in its turn, further intensifies the long-term decline in public trust in government that has been taking place since the early 1960s - a distrust that has been stoked by Republican rhetoric at every turn ("Government is the problem," declared Ronald Reagan in 1980).

Please read that again, and then read the whole piece. This is a Republican writing, from the inside. They are doing it on purpose. They are making the government dysfunctional on purpose. They are making people hate government on purpose. They are working to turn people against democracy and put themselves in power in its place.

Scientists discover virus that kills all types of breast cancer ‘within seven days’

By Stephen C. Webster - RAW Story
Friday, September 23rd, 2011
Scientists at the Penn State College of Medicine said this week they have discovered a virus that is capable of killing all types of breast cancer "within seven days" of first introduction in a laboratory setting.

The virus, known as adeno-associated virus type 2 (AAV2), is naturally occurring and carried by up to 80 percent of humans, but it does not cause any disease.

Researchers learned of its cancer-killing properties in 2005, after Penn State scientists observed it killing cervical cancer cells. They also found that women who carried the AAV2 virus and human papillomavirus (HPV), which causes cervical cancer, had a lower propensity to develop cervical cancer.

When combined in a lab recently, AAV2 eradicated all the breast cancer cells "within seven days," according to researchers. Better still, it proved capable of wiping out cancer cells at multiple stages, negating the need for differing treatments used today.

"If we can determine which viral genes are being used, we may be able to introduce those genes into a [therapy]," explained Penn State research associate Samina Alam. "If we can determine which pathways the virus is triggering, we can then screen new drugs that target those pathways. Or we may simply be able to use the virus itself."

The Center for Disease Control says that breast cancer is the most common type of cancer affecting American women, causing more deaths than any other form of the disease.
 
The American Cancer Society estimates that up to 39,520 women in the U.S. will die from cancer just this year, out of about 230,480 new cases discovered by doctors.

Christian Nation--In Name Only

We hear ad nauseum how the US is a "christian" nation. How can we be a christian nation while engaging in war in 7 countries, and cutting fund for social programs which meet the needs of those in poverty? 

Oh that's right...christians come pre-forgiven. Forgiveness is built right into the frontal lobe of their brains so that when they commit an act that the bible interprets as a sin, they just present their "Get out of hell free" card--"I'm sorry. I feel all kinds of awful, mister"--and it's just like they didn't kill innocent civilians in Afghanistan; or break up a family by sending addicted parents to prison (instead of a hospital or treatment center, both of which are proven methods of rehabilitation; prison is not "rehabilitating" in any aspect of that word) and their children into the CPS system; it's just like they didn't beat someone up because they were gay or performed abortions; it's just like they didn't bankroll the campaign of a congressman in order to have their man on the inside for crucial votes on cutting taxes for the wealthy while cutting healthcare for the poor and the elderly. "Oh, I'm sorry my greed always takes precedence over the needs of smelly old homeless poor people. In Jesus' name, amen. 

Really? Is that how it works? Please tell me that even Republicans feel at least a tiny bit of guilt for fucking over poor people. When no one is around, the doors are locked and there are no recording or broadcasting devices operating within view, do you feel the slightest bit of guilt knowing that you're OK with making the impoverished lives they have even worse? Terrorists are more evil because they destroy lives quickly? Congress destroys lives slowly over a long period of time, and that's good and christian? No, it's fucked up. Christianity can be a hollow religion because when you claim to have been born again or whatever voodoo ritual it takes for the holy spirit to enter your body, your sins are forgiven, so why decrease them? Christians have a bad history of killing and destroying other nations in their history book. And now, they can add kicking homeless people in the face cuz Jesus forgives them to their resumes. 

Christian in name only. I have to believe that actual Christians have no problem paying taxes that help fund social programs which offset the insurmountable financial difficulties that plague those living in poverty; but that they DO have a problem with paying taxes to fund war, or taxes which offset tax cuts for the wealthy instead of funding medicare for old people, many of whom are war veterans. How in the name of anything with an appearance of righteousness, can christians justify willfully destroying the lives of the people they are supposed to protect and nurture, according to the words attributed to their savior? They can't, they don't, they point at churches and say "they'll do it!" Without even asking whether churches are suffering financially like the rest of us in this opening few years of the next great depression. Churches and most all other charities are suffering financially too. They can't just add to their burden the needs of everyone negatively affected by cuts in social programs when they can't meet needs as it is, due to having received less money to begin with, but having a budget that doesn't account for down economies, and has the extra burden of making up for these tax cuts for the wealthy, rather than job cuts for the poor.

(Oh, please respond to this  any of you who are Republicans and/or Christians. I really want to know how you can defy Jesus' commands by gaining wealth and power and not taking care of the impoverished families in our country. Justify paying no taxes, creating no jobs, creating a permanent state of war--according to the things Jesus is to have said. I'm pretty sure making a conscious decision to screw over poor families is a hard core sin in the views of those sitting on the Board of Directors in Heaven.--jef)

Can a Movement Save the American Dream?

Friday, September 23, 2011 by The Nation

by Katrina vanden Heuvel and Robert Borosage

 

  

On October 3 activists from across the country will gather in Washington at the Take Back the American Dream conference, in the belief that only a citizens movement can save an American dream that grows ever more distant. In the face of a failed economy and a corrupted politics, the only hope for renewal is that citizens lead and politicians follow. 

www.rebuildthedream.com/

The modern American dream was inspired by a growing middle class that was the triumph of democracy after World War II. Its promise was and is opportunity: that hard work can earn a good life—a good job with decent pay and security, a home in a safe neighborhood, affordable healthcare, a secure retirement, a good education for the kids. The promise always exceeded the performance—especially with regard to racial and ethnic minorities, immigrants and women—and America never did as well as Europe in lifting the poor from misery. But a broad middle class and a broadly shared prosperity at least provided the possibility of a way up.

Now that middle class is sinking, imperiled by an economy that does not work for working people. Twenty-five million Americans are in need of full-time work, wages are declining and one in six people lives in poverty, the highest level in fifty years.

Every element of the dream is imperiled. Wages for the 70 percent of Americans without a college education have declined dramatically over the past forty years, although CEO salaries and corporate profits soared. Corporations continue to ship good jobs abroad, while the few jobs created at home are disproportionately in the low-wage service sector. One in four homes is underwater, devastating what has been the largest single asset for most middle-class families. Healthcare costs are soaring, with nearly 50 million uninsured. Half of all Americans have no retirement plan at work, pensions are disappearing and even Social Security and Medicare are targeted for cuts. College debt now exceeds credit card debt, with defaults rising and more and more students priced out of higher education.

The economy works fabulously well for the few. The richest 1 percent capture nearly a quarter of the nation’s income and control about 40 percent of its wealth. They have pocketed almost all the rewards of the past decade’s economic growth. Tahrir Square erupted in revolution in January, but America actually suffers greater inequality than Egypt.

Instead of an American dream, we have an American nightmare: a government, as Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz has written, of the top 1 percent, by the top 1 percent and for the top 1 percent.

This is not an accident; it is a defeat. It is the casualty of class warfare, waged and won, as Warren Buffett has noted, by the wealthiest few. Economists evoke globalization, technology and education as causal factors in our era’s extreme inequality. In fact, it results from policies that have weakened workers, liberated CEOs, starved social protections and savaged the middle class.

For more than thirty years, conservative ideas and corporate cronyism have consolidated their hold on both major political parties. Trade policy has been handed to the multinationals and the banks, which have not only transferred good jobs abroad but have given us a trade imbalance of more than $2 billion a day. Healthcare is dominated by drug companies and the insurance industry, creating a system that costs nearly twice as much per capita as the rest of the industrial world while delivering inferior care. Big Oil and King Coal exert a stranglehold on our energy policy, with the United States forfeiting the lead it once had in the green technologies that will be central to the markets of the future. Finance liberated itself from regulation, unleashing the Wall Street wilding that drove the economy over a cliff in 2008. The Pentagon’s budget is higher than it was during the cold war.


Hope Frustrated 

The past three years provide an object lesson in the power of entrenched interests. Elected in the midst of the worst economic meltdown since the Great Depression, President Obama captured a majority of the vote (the first Democrat to do so since Jimmy Carter) with a mandate for change. In January 2009 Democrats held fifty-eight Senate seats and a large House majority led by the most progressive Speaker in history, Nancy Pelosi. Crisis, mandate, majority—all were in place for reform.

Obama put forth reforms in areas the country must address: healthcare, energy and finance. The president’s proposals were cautious, often pre-emptively compromised, but he had his head handed to him anyway. The economic recovery act was weakened, energy reform blocked, financial re-regulation neutered, healthcare deformed. Conservative obstruction and powerful corporate interests stymied change.

The failure fed voter skepticism about government. Washington bailed out Wall Street but did little for Main Street. It ran up deficits but failed to generate jobs. The White House embraced establishment calls for a premature turn to deficit reduction, distracting from the need for more federal action to stimulate economic recovery. Pollster Stanley Greenberg says voters “think that the game is rigged.” As he summarizes, they “see a nexus of money and power, greased by special interest lobbyists and large campaign donations…. They do not believe the fundamentals have really changed in Mr. Obama’s Washington.”

The economic calamity, and bipartisan collusion with Wall Street, set the stage for citizen protest. With Democrats in control of Washington, the right appealed to popular anger, most notably through the much-hyped Tea Party. Contrary to initial reports, it was composed not of independents but of right-wing activists, many initially driven by racial resentment. Its members tend to be older, whiter and more affluent than the general population. Its grassroots energy was bolstered by lavishly funded Astroturf organizations like Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks, backed in part by the billionaire Koch brothers.

The Tea Partiers used the spectacle of corrupted politics to make a conservative case: Washington doesn’t work for you; get your money back. Its leaders often sounded populist themes, as Sarah Palin did at a Tea Party rally this past summer: “The permanent political class—they’re doing just fine…. They derive power and their wealth from their access to our money—to taxpayer dollars. They use it to bail out their friends on Wall Street and their corporate cronies, and to reward campaign contributors, and to buy votes via earmarks….

And there is a name for this: it’s called corporate crony capitalism.” It’s a hoary flimflam: the Tea Party’s agenda belies the populist rhetoric. The current GOP House majority, allegedly dominated by the Tea Party, champions the same elite policies that helped create the mess: lower taxes on the wealthy, rollback of basic services, assault on unions, corporate trade, Big Oil energy, financial deregulation. The only difference is their ambition: GOP zealots would roll back not simply Obama’s reforms but the Great Society, the New Deal—indeed, much of the twentieth century. Not surprisingly, those goals have little appeal to the vast majority of Americans.


Waiting for Lefty?
 
So where was protest on the left? Historically, whenever America has reached this extreme of what Citigroup analysts dubbed “plutonomy,” popular mass movements have arisen to champion economic justice. Populist movements of the late nineteenth century confronted the robber barons. The Socialist and Communist parties and Huey Long’s Share Our Wealth movement grew threatening enough to goad Franklin Roosevelt into the second New Deal, including Social Security; the Wagner Act, recognizing the right of workers to organize; and much more. And in more prosperous times, the civil rights movement forced the end of apartheid in the American South; the anti–Vietnam War movement drove Lyndon Johnson out of office; and the women’s, gay rights, consumer and environmental movements all helped to make America better. More recently, the movement against the war in Iraq helped sweep Democrats into power in 2006 and 2008.

Progressives did organize demonstrations in the wake of the economic collapse. Groups like National People’s Action sought to defend homeowners against foreclosure and led protests against big banks. The broad We Are One coalition, anchored by labor unions, sponsored a national march for jobs in the run-up to the 2010 elections. But these and other efforts received shamefully little mainstream press and generated little momentum.

Significant progressive attention and resources were committed to helping pass the Obama reform agenda. Support for the president muted many critics, particularly among African-Americans, whose economic losses were the most devastating.

The sweeping GOP victories last year shattered that complacency. Despite continued mass unemployment, Republicans have dominated the debate about who will pay to clean up the mess left by Wall Street’s excesses—and what kind of economy will emerge out of the ditch. Their assault sparked a vigorous progressive response.

When teachers, students and firefighters joined union members in Wisconsin to defend worker rights and oppose the assault on schools and public services, the mass demonstrations electrified progressives and captured national attention. When House Republicans passed a budget that would have ended Medicare as we know it while cutting taxes on the wealthy, angry citizens filled Congressional town halls across the country.

The Social Contract

Friday, September 23, 2011 by The New York Times

by Paul Krugman

 

 

This week President Obama said the obvious: that wealthy Americans, many of whom pay remarkably little in taxes, should bear part of the cost of reducing the long-run budget deficit. And Republicans like Representative Paul Ryan responded with shrieks of “class warfare.”

It was, of course, nothing of the sort. On the contrary, it’s people like Mr. Ryan, who want to exempt the very rich from bearing any of the burden of making our finances sustainable, who are waging class war.


As background, it helps to know what has been happening to incomes over the past three decades. Detailed estimates from the Congressional Budget Office — which only go up to 2005, but the basic picture surely hasn’t changed — show that between 1979 and 2005 the inflation-adjusted income of families in the middle of the income distribution rose 21 percent. That’s growth, but it’s slow, especially compared with the 100 percent rise in median income over a generation after World War II.

Meanwhile, over the same period, the income of the very rich, the top 100th of 1 percent of the income distribution, rose by 480 percent. No, that isn’t a misprint. In 2005 dollars, the average annual income of that group rose from $4.2 million to $24.3 million.

So do the wealthy look to you like the victims of class warfare?

To be fair, there is argument about the extent to which government policy was responsible for the spectacular disparity in income growth. What we know for sure, however, is that policy has consistently tilted to the advantage of the wealthy as opposed to the middle class.

Some of the most important aspects of that tilt involved such things as the sustained attack on organized labor and financial deregulation, which created huge fortunes even as it paved the way for economic disaster. For today, however, let’s focus just on taxes.

The budget office’s numbers show that the federal tax burden has fallen for all income classes, which itself runs counter to the rhetoric you hear from the usual suspects. But that burden has fallen much more, as a percentage of income, for the wealthy. Partly this reflects big cuts in top income tax rates, but, beyond that, there has been a major shift of taxation away from wealth and toward work: tax rates on corporate profits, capital gains and dividends have all fallen, while the payroll tax — the main tax paid by most workers — has gone up.

And one consequence of the shift of taxation away from wealth and toward work is the creation of many situations in which — just as Warren Buffett and Mr. Obama say — people with multimillion-dollar incomes, who typically derive much of that income from capital gains and other sources that face low taxes, end up paying a lower overall tax rate than middle-class workers. And we’re not talking about a few exceptional cases.

According to new estimates by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, one-fourth of those with incomes of more than $1 million a year pay income and payroll tax of 12.6 percent of their income or less, putting their tax burden below that of many in the middle class.

Now, I know how the right will respond to these facts: with misleading statistics and dubious moral claims.

On one side, we have the claim that the rising share of taxes paid by the rich shows that their burden is rising, not falling. To point out the obvious, the rich are paying more taxes because they’re much richer than they used to be. When middle-class incomes barely grow while the incomes of the wealthiest rise by a factor of six, how could the tax share of the rich not go up, even if their tax rate is falling?

On the other side, we have the claim that the rich have the right to keep their money — which misses the point that all of us live in and benefit from being part of a larger society.

Elizabeth Warren, the financial reformer who is now running for the United States Senate in Massachusetts, recently made some eloquent remarks to this effect that are, rightly, getting a lot of attention. “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody,” she declared, pointing out that the rich can only get rich thanks to the “social contract” that provides a decent, functioning society in which they can prosper.

Which brings us back to those cries of “class warfare.”

Republicans claim to be deeply worried by budget deficits. Indeed, Mr. Ryan has called the deficit an “existential threat” to America. Yet they are insisting that the wealthy — who presumably have as much of a stake as everyone else in the nation’s future — should not be called upon to play any role in warding off that existential threat.

Well, that amounts to a demand that a small number of very lucky people be exempted from the social contract that applies to everyone else. And that, in case you’re wondering, is what real class warfare looks like.

How the Two-Party Duopoly Operates

Friday, September 23, 2011 by Salon.com

by David Sirota

 

(Salon)

By now, probably everyone reading this is already sick of America's quadrennial political spectacle -- the one in which politicians and media outlets ask us to believe that there remain vast differences between our two political parties. It's like cheaply staged pornography on a red and blue set, with words like "polarization," "socialist" and "extremist" comprising the breathless dialogue in a wholly unconvincing plot.

Some of this tripe can be momentarily compelling, of course. And as the 2012 election climax draws nearer, many Americans will no doubt submit to the fantasy. But before that happens, it's worth looking a few levels beneath the orgiastic presidential campaign for a last necessary dose of nonfiction, if only to remind us that the parties are often two heads of the same political monster.

As good a place as any to get such a dose is my home state of Colorado, which this month provided two emblematic examples of how the two party duopoly really operates.

Exhibit A is our Republican secretary of state, Scott Gessler. Though his job is to enforce campaign finance rules and protect voting rights, he's proudly using his office for exactly the opposite.

After being elected in 2010, he first reduced campaign finance fines against the local Republican Party in Larimer County, then announced that he will headline a fundraiser to help that local party pay off the levies. Now, this GOP hack is suing the overwhelmingly Democratic bastion of Denver in an attempt to prevent ballots from being sent to 55,000 of the city's registered voters. Gessler's public rationale? He says that because these citizens chose not to vote in the last election, they shouldn't get ballots this year.

Exhibit B is Democrat Tom Strickland -- a flesh-and-blood monument to revolving-door corruption.

Back in the 1990s, Strickland got his start serving as Colorado's U.S. attorney. He then slid into a lucrative job at one of Colorado's top corporate law firms. A few years later, he jumped back into public service, making two failed Democratic bids for the U.S. Senate. From there, it was on to the executive vice presidency of UnitedHealth Group, one of the nation's most rapacious health insurance companies. When Barack Obama was elected president, Strickland headed back into government, as the chief of staff of the Interior Department -- the agency that's supposed to regulate the oil and gas industry. Then, this week, Strickland got himself a job at the law firm defending BP in the Deepwater Horizon spill.

Despite being tied to major issues and a crucially important electoral swing state, and despite the overtly public nature of their moves, Gessler and Strickland's actions received almost no national media attention, which reminds us that these two political figures are not special cases -- their behavior is today's unquestioned norm.

Gessler represents both a bipartisan effort to undermine campaign finance regulations and an ends-justify-the-means-ism that has become pervasive in American politics -- in this case, his is the Republican kind that is aimed at suppressing the vote. Strickland, meanwhile, embodies the Democratic side of a permanent bipartisan elite that has made corporatism and public service completely synonymous. The two Coloradans may exemplify different pathologies, but those pathologies both contribute to our political system's overarching dysfunction.

So the next time you tune into a cable TV pundit-a-thon or a talk-radio screamfest that tells you how "divided" American politics is, and how one party is so much more honorable than the other, remember Colorado and all the other examples like it before you head down the rabbit hole of election-year delusion.

The Miseducation of the President

Ron Suskind describes a leader pulled off course by his staff. But we still don't know where Obama wants to take us.
September 21, 2011  |   This story was originally published at Salon. 

By Joan Walsh, Salon


 President Obama has a feisty new tone this week, offering up a deficit plan with taxes on the rich and no increase in the Medicare eligibility age (a reported feature of his failed "grand bargain" with the GOP last month). And when Republicans (and silly Dems) called his proposals "class warfare," he shot back: "This is not class warfare. It’s math."

Maybe Obama read Ron Suskind's controversial book over the weekend, and decided it was time to take control of his presidency and put it on the side of struggling Americans, rather than on the side of super-wealthy Wall Street titans who destroyed the economy, where it's been since Inauguration Day.

It's unlikely the president is finding lessons in Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington and the Education of a President; the White House is pushing back, hard, on Suskind's revelations. The coverage has mostly hyped "shocking" anecdotes about an inexperienced president poorly served by scheming aides and Cabinet members who fought among themselves and frequently ignored the president's own wishes. But the question at the heart of Suskind's book is much more interesting: Who is Barack Obama, and what exactly did he want to do with his presidency?

Was he a bold visionary with big plans, who was hampered by disloyal aides and his own lack of leadership experience? Or did the many examples of underlings "slow-walking" or "relitigating" or simply ignoring the president's alleged decisions, without paying any penalty for their insubordination, reflect Obama's own lack of clarity about and commitment to his priorities and choices?

At the end of the book, the reader has to make a leap of faith -- of confidence, in fact -- about the answer to those questions. Suskind provides evidence for both views.

Bold visionary Obama periodically sides with staffers pushing big moves to break up what Suskind memorably describes as "the debt machine": the financial sector contraption that seized the American economy, almost destroyed it in 2008 and yet, tragically, still runs it in 2011. The book's good guys -- former Fed chair Paul Volcker, consumer protection visionary Elizabeth Warren, Commodity Futures Trading head Gary Gensler, Council of Economic Advisors chair Christina Romer, adviser Austan Goolsbee and the FDIC's Sheila Bair -- turn up regularly with good progressive ideas to beat back financial sector treachery that catch Obama's attention and win his backing ... for a while.

But in the end, whether it's "Volcker's Rule" keeping banks out of speculative, proprietary trading; Gensler's effort to force the trading of poorly understood derivatives on "exchanges" where their shady contents could be better examined; or Bair's push for a contingency plan to force the toxic behemoth Citibank into bankruptcy; the tough reforms never materialized. They were watered down to insignificance, or as in the case of the Citi breakup, abandoned completely.

The book's most controversial revelation, strenuously denied by the White House, is that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner either "slow-walked" or absolutely ignored the president's directive to come up with a plan to break up the spectacularly failing Citibank. It's become a big story, because it serves a couple of narratives: It provides Obama admirers with evidence that the president had progressive priorities and values, but his underlings thwarted them. It provides his critics (on left and right) with more fodder for the view that the president is in over his head, unready for the job we gave him.

The fact is, the material Suskind presents is inconclusive. By the president's own admission, the "instructions" to draw up a contingency plan to dismantle Citi were vague enough that his different advisors could legitimately disagree about his real intent.

When Suskind asks Obama if he was "agitated" by Geithner's failure to develop a plan for Citi, his answer is classic no-drama Obama, Zen Man:

"Agitated may be too strong a word. During this period what we are increasingly recognizing is that there are no good options."

He goes on:

"What's true is that I was often pushing hard, and the speed with which the bureaucracy could exercise my decision was slower than I wanted. But I don't think, it's not clear to me -- and I'll have to reflect on this at some point -- it's not clear to me that that was necessarily because of a management problem, as it was that this is really hard stuff."

Frankly, given Obama's answer, I'll give that one to Geithner. There's no hard evidence he ignored a firm directive from his boss -- and if he did, it obviously wasn't a big deal, because Geithner is one of the few people from the president's original economic team still employed at the White House. If the president wanted a tougher approach with Citibank, or with any other malefactor of great wealth, he'd have forced his subordinates to develop one, and fired them if they didn't.

- - - - - - - - - -

Whatever happened with Citibank, it's clear that at every turn, Obama made choices that protected the Wall Street status quo, and Geithner was behind every single decision. Although during the campaign Obama seemed to be closer to a group of economists Suskind labels Team A -- voices for strong action like Volcker, former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich, and Clinton advisor Laura Tyson -- when it came time to staff his economic shop, he chose from Team B, most of whom had clustered around the infamous Robert Rubin, who moved from the Clinton White House to Citibank. He picked Geithner and Larry Summers precisely for their caution when it came to dramatic action regarding the banks. Obama seemed reassured by Geithner's tiresome reliance on the Hippocratic Oath, "First, do no harm."

On the Volcker team, "harming" the debt machine that destroyed the economy was precisely the point. Suskind does a magnificent job explaining the way an economy centered on debt has decimated the middle class and made the top 1 percent of Americans impossibly wealthy. The entire machinery of government, under Democrats and Republicans, has been rigged to privilege the financial sector over any other business sector for the last 30 years. Household debt, which had run between 30 and 50 percent of GDP for decades, doubled in the 2000s, to almost 100 percent of GDP. Family savings rates became "negative," meaning people used credit to spend more than they earned.

Essentially, the economy now runs on the financial sector's genius in finding ways to profit by lending Americans the money they haven't received from their employers in wage increases since the 1970s.

A Wall Street lobbyist says as much to Suskind during the debate over financial regulatory reform: "Maybe we did this to ourselves, sure, but we're just responding to the way things are. We've gone 'long' on developing markets around the world, and gone 'short' on America, where the whole game is using debt to give people what they haven't been able to earn, and may never earn."

Geithner worked hard to protect the debt machine and its masters. He opposed limits on executive compensation at firms receiving TARP funds, insisted on paying AIG's debts at 100 percent (instead of a smaller sum like creditors would have had to accept in a bankruptcy proceeding), squashed a tax based on bank size (to discourage "too big to fail" titans). One prominent banker tells Suskind his colleagues expected much harsher treatment from the Obama administration in the administration of TARP and other decisions. "For Washington to not demand anything when it saved us, even stuff that we know is for our long-term good, was one of the stupidest moves in modern times ... I feel like I should go over and hug Tim. It's a shame we can't pay him, 'cause that's a guy who really earned a big-time bonus."

Suskind also spends time on the stimulus debate, where proponents of big moves likewise lost. Romer argued forcefully the stimulus should be at least $1.2 trillion, but Peter Orszag told Suskind they couldn't do anything over a trillion, out of "a concern we would look wacko lefty." Better to let the economy decline than look "wacko lefty," I guess. Larry Summers didn't even present Romer's $1.2 trillion suggestion to Obama, but she pushed for it herself in a meeting, and Obama chose to go with the pragmatists.

Some of the book's most unsettling revelations have to do with White House sexism, or maybe it's best described as "guyism," as in Obama just misses the way his guy culture leaves out women, however inadvertently. Most of the juicy stories have already been dissected -- and denied, not convincingly, by some of the women involved: Anita Dunn saying the White House would "fit all of the classic legal requirements for a genuinely hostile workplace to women”; Christina Romer complaining she was overlooked and undermined so often by Larry Summers she "felt like a piece of meat"; a "women's dinner" convened by Valerie Jarrett to allow the president to hear the complaints of his top female staff directly. (It's a little awkward to learn that Obama greeted Christina Romer, the first time they met, by declaring that monetary policy had "shot its wad.")

Most of this stuff has been known since the New York Times' Mark Leibovich revealed that the president's fondness for bonding on the basketball court and golf course was leaving female staffers on the sidelines. But Suskind offers one telling anecdote about Obama's approach to gender that's been overlooked in coverage to date. Early in the book, during a campaign strategy session on candidate Obama's economic program, he and his advisors discuss the continuing erosion of jobs and wages for low to moderately skilled male workers. The big job opportunities, one researcher explains, will be in the exploding realm of healthcare -- positions for nurses, hospital orderlies and in-home assistants to frail seniors will boom.

Obama jumps in: "Look, these are guys," he says. "A lot of them see health care, being nurse's aides, as women's work. They need to do something that fits with how they define themselves as men." Quickly the conversation turned to infrastructure: fixing the nation's crumbling roads, bridges, schools and public buildings. Men like to build, the group concludes, and infrastructure offers a campaign promise that promotes employment, improves our public roads and buildings, and makes working-class men feel better about themselves. It's a threefer, the kind of big idea Obama likes. He leaves the meeting energized. "Good meeting," he tells the guys. "Real good.

Of course, there was no big infrastructure campaign, although Obama has made a pitch for an infrastructure bank in the last year, when he'd already lost control of the economic and political narrative. I could shrug off Obama's "guyism" in that conversation about "women's work," if only he'd had the courage to follow through and push a program that would create jobs, fix what needs fixing and shore up male employment. Instead, we have unconscionably high unemployment, plus a window into the president's retro view of "men's" and "women's work."

That meeting is important for another reason. Princeton economist Alan Krueger gave a seminar on all the trends taking down the economy. He presented a graphic slide: "Growing Together (1947-1973) vs. Growing Apart (1973-2005)." I've seen the slide: It starkly depicts the American dream years, when real family income grew 3 percent a year and the big increases went to those at the bottom. After 1973, we move into the American bust years. Growth for most people slowed or declined -- except for the top 5 percent. Candidate Obama professed to understand and want to tackle that crisis head-on, with tax hikes for the wealthy, tough new reforms for Wall Street, an infrastructure crusade for unemployed and underemployed men (and, I trust, women), but he didn't do any of that. He didn't even push for it very hard.

Maybe more vexing, candidate Obama had smart early advisors who saw what was coming on Wall Street and warned him: about the derivatives disasters; the "repo books" where companies borrowed and loaned one another cash without examining the shoddy collateral put up to secure loans, which increasingly companies couldn't pay back; about the extent to which big firms like Goldman Sachs made money betting against their clients and the entire economy. You can argue that Obama became president because he spoke knowledgeably and reassuringly about the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy apocalypse in September 2008, while John McCain was still insisting "the fundamentals of our economy are strong." With his head start, Obama should have been wiser about how to get on top of the Wall Street disaster, and his early speeches were. It's also possible the intimacy that led his Wall Street friends to give him a heads up on the coming crisis also prevented him from breaking up their racket.

- - - - - - - - - -

Suskind frequently stops mid-narrative to grapple with the central question of his book: Was the problem mainly with Obama's staff, which can be corrected by a staff shakeup, and with the president's early inexperienced leadership, which can be ameliorated by experience? Or is there something missing in Obama himself, in his vision and values, that led to the lack of bold action to solve the nation's biggest problems? He points to a defining moment in Obama's candidacy, when he's making his final decision about whether to run for president with his closest advisors, and Michelle says:

"You need to ask yourself why you want to do this. What are you hoping to uniquely accomplish, Barack?"

Obama answers:

"The world will see us differently. Millions of kids across this country will see themselves differently."

Clearly, that was a worthy goal; electing our first black president would change -- did change -- America. But his answer didn't reveal what he would accomplish after he was elected president. Obama's appeal and his motivation were wrapped up in his story; but his story isn't a platform, an ideology or a set of policy prescriptions.

If we take Obama's answer a step beyond where Suskind leaves it, if we examine Obama's story, and look at the "American exceptionalism" that made his presidency possible, I think it also explains his worldview, and his priorities: Obama believes he is the creation of a fundamentally sound American meritocracy, which is often but not always distorted by race; where a kid whose father came from Kenya and whose mother came from Kansas, mostly raised by his grandparents in Hawaii, could get the opportunity, despite his race and his funny name, to rise and just keep rising -- Punahou Prep, Columbia University, Harvard Law School. Is this a great country, or what? It helps explain how an administration made up of Ivy League standouts, "the best and the brightest," to use David Halberstam's chilling phrase about JFK's team, updated for the 21st century, could wind up in an economic quagmire to rival the one Kennedy's men created in Vietnam.

On the question of whether the problem is with Obama's political values and priorities, or just his lack of leadership experience, Suskind doesn't seem sure himself. He closes the book with a picture of a president who's been "educated" on the ways of the White House, a picture that reassures Suskind a little. Obama cleans house after the midterm debacle, getting rid of most of his top staff, and he executes a big deal with Mitch McConnell and John Boehner to extend the Bush tax cuts, in exchange for extending unemployment insurance and a payroll tax cut, which would provide a stimulus of almost $500 billion over the next year. Suskind questions the content of the deal, but there's no doubt he sees a glimmer of hope for the young president in his bold deal-making: Finally, he wasn't paralyzed by the indecision of his staff or the carping of congressional Democrats. Indeed, Obama's approval ratings rise, briefly.

Obama explains his rationale to Suskind this way:

"What I think I was able to recognize was that, at this juncture, the country will feel better about itself and that will have important ramifications. If they see Democrats and Republicans agreeing on anything ... Because right now they are just exhausted with the partisan wars that are taking place."

Of course, that's the kind of values-neutral, content-free maneuver the president specializes in, and it doesn't offer a vision for how the country can and must change, to get out from under the debt machine and to begin to create an economy that works for everyone. It's the very attitude that led to the worst paralysis of his presidency, the debt-ceiling debacle, when Republicans held the economy hostage and Obama indulged them, for a while, hoping to reach a grand bargain that would again, he sadly believed, make the country "feel better about itself," because Washington worked, and Republicans and Democrats agreed. Even if they agreed on moves that would damage the country.

But it's possible, since the book was completed, that Obama himself learned from that disaster: The country won't feel better about itself if the president surrenders and makes bad deals; it will feel better when conditions are better, and that's going to require Obama to stand up and fight. He may finally have learned, as he's watched his approval rating decline in the nine grim months since the tax-cut deal, that the country wants results. It wants its leader to lead. That's the Obama we've had a glimpse of in the last week, as Suskind's book laid out his early mistakes. Let's hope this guy sticks around.

A Billionaires' Coup in the US

Friday, September 23, 2011 by The Guardian/UK
The debt deal will hurt the poorest Americans, convinced by Fox and the Tea Party to act against their own welfare

by George Monbiot

There are two ways of cutting a deficit: raising taxes or reducing spending. Raising taxes means taking money from the rich. Cutting spending means taking money from the poor. Not in all cases of course: some taxation is regressive; some state spending takes money from ordinary citizens and gives it to banks, arms companies, oil barons and farmers. But in most cases the state transfers wealth from rich to poor, while tax cuts shift it from poor to rich.

So the rich, in a nominal democracy, have a struggle on their hands. Somehow they must persuade the other 99% to vote against their own interests: to shrink the state, supporting spending cuts rather than tax rises. In the US they appear to be succeeding.

Partly as a result of the Bush tax cuts of 2001, 2003 and 2005 (shamefully extended by Barack Obama), taxation of the wealthy, in Obama's words, "is at its lowest level in half a century". The consequence of such regressive policies is a level of inequality unknown in other developed nations. As the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz points out, in the past 10 years the income of the top 1% has risen by 18%, while that of blue-collar male workers has fallen by 12%.

The deal being thrashed out in Congress as this article goes to press seeks only to cut state spending. As the former Republican senator Alan Simpson says: "The little guy is going to be cremated." That means more economic decline, which means a bigger deficit. It's insane. But how did it happen?

The immediate reason is that Republican members of Congress supported by the Tea Party movement won't budge. But this explains nothing. The Tea Party movement mostly consists of people who have been harmed by tax cuts for the rich and spending cuts for the poor and middle. Why would they mobilise against their own welfare? You can understand what is happening in Washington only if you remember what everyone seems to have forgotten: how this movement began.

On Sunday the Observer claimed that "the Tea Party rose out of anger over the scale of federal spending, and in particular in bailing out the banks". This is what its members claim. It's nonsense.

The movement started with Rick Santelli's call on CNBC for a tea party of city traders to dump securities in Lake Michigan, in protest at Obama's plan to "subsidise the losers". In other words, it was a demand for a financiers' mobilisation against the bailout of their victims: people losing their homes. On the same day, a group called Americans for Prosperity (AFP) set up a Tea Party Facebook page and started organising Tea Party events. The movement, whose programme is still lavishly supported by AFP, took off from there.

So who or what is Americans for Prosperity? It was founded and is funded by Charles and David Koch. They run what they call "the biggest company you've never heard of", and between them they are worth $43bn. Koch Industries is a massive oil, gas, minerals, timber and chemicals company. In the past 15 years the brothers have poured at least $85m into lobby groups arguing for lower taxes for the rich and weaker regulations for industry. The groups and politicians the Kochs fund also lobby to destroy collective bargaining, to stop laws reducing carbon emissions, to stymie healthcare reform and to hobble attempts to control the banks. During the 2010 election cycle, AFP spent $45m supporting its favoured candidates.

But the Kochs' greatest political triumph is the creation of the Tea Party movement. Taki Oldham's film (Astro)Turf Wars shows Tea Party organisers reporting back to David Koch at their 2009 Defending the Dream summit, explaining the events and protests they've started with AFP help. "Five years ago," he tells them, "my brother Charles and I provided the funds to start Americans for Prosperity. It's beyond my wildest dreams how AFP has grown into this enormous organisation."

AFP mobilised the anger of people who found their conditions of life declining, and channelled it into a campaign to make them worse. Tea Party campaigners take to the streets to demand less tax for billionaires and worse health, education and social insurance for themselves.

Are they stupid? No. They have been misled by another instrument of corporate power: the media. The movement has been relentlessly promoted by Fox News, which belongs to a more familiar billionaire. Like the Kochs, Rupert Murdoch aims to misrepresent the democratic choices we face, in order to persuade us to vote against our own interests and in favour of his.

What's taking place in Congress right now is a kind of political coup. A handful of billionaires have shoved a spanner into the legislative process. Through the candidates they have bought and the movement that supports them, they are now breaking and reshaping the system to serve their interests. We knew this once, but now we've forgotten. What hope do we have of resisting a force we won't even see?

Jobs Act's Pre-Emptive Concessions Show More Pressure Needed Within and Outside Washington

by: Amy Dean, Truthout | News Analysis

 Thursday 22 September 2011


President Obama's speech about jobs last week was a step forward. But we need to do better. We need to do better on policy, and better on politics.

Here's what that means:

On policy, Obama's jobs proposal is a lot like his administration's health care reform.

If passed, the act would provide some measure of relief for Americans who desperately need it. The fact that it extends unemployment insurance and could create as many as 1.9 million jobs in 2012, according to Mark Zandi at Moody's Analytics, is something that we should not take lightly, even if we think that the plan does not go far enough. The president was right when he noted that too many people "are living week to week, paycheck to paycheck, even day to day.

They need help and they need it now." Just as the health care bill was certainly imperfect, but nevertheless allowed tens of thousands who were previously excluded to gain health care coverage, the administration's jobs act does offer some short-term relief.

Unfortunately, its gains will hardly be enough to offset the damage done to the pubic sector in recent years. With hiring in the private sector barely limping forward, the government is an absolutely critical employer. Yet, the administration has been complicit in accepting a framework of austerity and agreeing to cut back essential public services. Doing better on jobs will require a robust defense of government and President Obama has yet to provide this.

In terms of the private sector, we must recognize that providing tax incentives for businesses will not be enough. We've known for decades that creating favorable terms for business to invest does not translate into job creation in the absence of policy mechanisms that require it. Unless we explicitly mandate that businesses produce new jobs - and good jobs - as a condition of receiving public support, the record shows that they will not create the employment we need. This is not the time to hand out public money with no accountability. Tax breaks and other incentives should be tied to measurable job creation, because without real accountability, the relief offered by the job act will be all too fleeting.

Even more than policy, we need to do better in terms of politics. And this is where the Obama administration's proposal really fails.

It fails because it does not contain enough of substance to excite the Democratic base, yet it will still be ardently opposed by the Republicans. Given the extraordinarily obstructionist track record of the conservatives in Congress, we can expect them to fight anything that Democrats put on the table. Therefore, overtures designed to bring them in are pointless.

Putting forward a bold, progressive program at least allows us to set the framework for debate. It forces them to debate on our terms and makes them have to explain to the American people why they are opposing policies that would be substantive solutions to our economic problems. In contrast, proposals filled with pre-emptive concessions do little to reframe the debate and they do nothing to compel the electoral coalition that put Obama in office to feel energized and invested in supporting the White House jobs drive.

Moving forward, however, not everything is up to the White House. Progressives are right to be dissatisfied, yet we, too, must do better on politics. We have to be prepared to build a movement - not just have an internal debate in Washington about what's good or bad about the president's actions. This means relearning how to do the inside-outside dance with an elected leader. Electing better insiders, while also turning up the heat from the outside, requires doing more than lambasting the president for his failures. We must create the political space and the political will among lawmakers to push better solutions.

The need for us to create outside pressure is not unique to Obama and it is not a function of our judgment about his moral compass or political aptitude. It is always a crucial part of the equation for creating political change in America. Unless politicians feel legitimate pressure to do otherwise, they will always engage in a lowest-common-denominator game of legislative policy making, with self-preservation as its center of gravity. Our job is to compel them to pursue solutions more ambitious than they would be inclined to take up otherwise.

As we work to advance real job-creation measures, we must make the stakes of this debate clear. The Democrats have yet to hold the Republicans accountable for what they are really doing: If they are not putting forward policies which allow those who work hard and play by the rules to be rewarded, conservatives are tearing at the civic fabric of our nation. They are destroying any sense of enfranchisement that Americans have in this country.