New Labor Stats Show GOP Assault on Public Unions Is Working

Wednesday, January 23, 2013 by Common Dreams
Numbers 'reflect concerted attack on organized labor'
- Jon Queally, staff writer

 

As the Washington Post's Jim Tankersley points out and new data from the US Department of Labor released on Wednesday confirms, the Republican push to destroy public sector unions in the last several years is having its desired effect.

 

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' new figures on unionization, the percentage of organized workers in the US took a sharp—and 'unusual'—decline last year, dropping from 11.8 percent in 2011 to 11.3 percent in 2012.

Moreover, as the New York Times highlights, the largest dip came not from the typical source of private union attrition caused by offshoring or factory closings, but from job losses in the public sector, which caused overall public sector union rates to drop more than full point in one year—from 37 percent to 35.9 percent.

Private sector unions—long in decline due to outsourcing linked to corporate globalization policies—now currently have about 7 million members, whereas public employee unions have roughly 7.3 million members.

The curious trend that Tankersley points out is the role that government-pushed austerity has played in union attrition. He writes:

The big culprit for last year’s drop doesn’t appear to be outsourcing (though union factory employment has fallen since the recession, while non-union employment has risen). The issue was austerity.

Specifically, state and local governments laid off a lot of workers last year to help balance their budgets. That means they let a lot of union members go. The Labor Department reports that more than half of all U.S. union members work in the public sector; government is nearly 36 percent unionized, while the private-sector union membership rate is less than 7 percent. (Last year’s stats suggest that some Republican governors’ efforts to reduce unionization in their state public sectors is working – Wisconsin posted a 2.1 percentage point drop in union membership from 2011 to 2012.)

Asking labor leaders to respond to the statistics on membership, Tankersley said they 'roundly' agreed that the drop in rates "reflected a concerted attack on organized labor and an austerity hit to the economy that affects everyone, not just folks with a union card."

“The economic crisis—and the politicians who took advantage of it for their own anti-worker purposes—had a negative impact,” Lee Saunders, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, told Tankersley.

And Richard Trumka, president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., the nation’s main union federation, added: “Working women and men urgently need a voice on the job today, but the sad truth is that it has become more difficult for them to have one, as today’s figures on union membership demonstrate.”

Obama's GOP Talking Points on the Economy

A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving GOP debate

GOP candidate Buddy Roemer: ‘We’re in trouble’

By Muriel Kane - RAW Story
Sunday, October 23, 2011
Former Louisiana Governor Buddy Roemer, who is a declared Republican presidential candidate although he has not been included in any debates, has come out in support of Occupy Wall Street.

“There’s anger and anxiety in America. We’re in trouble,” he told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes on Sunday. “There is no leadership in either party that spells out what we must do now and for the next ten years.”

Roemer asserted that the only two genuine issues of the campaign are corruption and jobs. “Washington, DC is corrupt,” he stated flatly, “and we must change it.”

“I would love to live in a world in which you were the leading GOP contender,” Hayes responded. “But it just seems like it’s delusional to pretend that the Republican primary base shares anything with the worldview that you are enunciating.”

Roemer didn’t have an answer to that question but returned to his charge that because of the corruption in Washington, Obama has to care more about getting reelected than about jobs.

“He hasn’t made it a priority. There are no new ideas, here,” he insisted. “Everything is a temporary patch. Everything is a band-aid. Why don’t you stand up to unfair trade to China, Mr. President? Is it because your jobs adviser is head of a company that fires Americans and builds plants overseas? I’d say Made in America ought to be the issue in this campaign.”

“The parties have become fundraising shills for the status quo,” Roemer complained. “I was the only governor to change parties while in office. I got sick of the Democrats. Now I’m in the Republican Party. Can’t even get in a debate to talk about jobs, talk about corruption. … I’m a proud Republican, but I’m a prouder American.”

This video is from MSNBC, October 23, 2011.

The Secret Republican

Obama Fails Wall Street “Conspirators” Too

by ANDREW LEVINE

 

“Conspiracy theories” have a bad press.  But sometimes conspiracies are real and sometimes conspiracy theories do account for what they purport to explain.  Whether they do or not is an empirical question.  Because real world politics is propelled by multiple, heterogeneous causes, and because political actors seldom rise to a genuinely Machiavellian level, the usual criteria for determining what the best explanations are – elegance, simplicity and the like – are of little use.  Evidence is all.

If no compelling evidence of a conspiracy surfaces, especially over many years and especially too if the purported conspiracy would have had to involve vast numbers of people, that’s an excellent reason to think that there was no conspiracy.   This is why it is more plausible than not, after almost five decades, to believe that Lee Harvey Oswald killed JFK on his own.  Only a decade has passed since 9/11 but the fact that no evidence of a conspiracy of the kind “truthers” argue for has yet to emerge is decisive in that case too, especially in light of the manifest incompetence of everyone connected with the alleged plot.

Thanks to the resurgence of what Richard Hofstadter called “the paranoid style” in American politics, conspiracy theories based on little or no evidence have multiplied alarmingly in recent years.   Many of them are manifestly implausible.  For example, the idea that Barack Obama is a secret Muslim is plainly false because it would explain nothing.  Obama has done as much to harm the historically Muslim world as any American president, including George W. Bush, so he would, at the very least, have to be a “self-hating” secret Muslim, an idea that runs counter to the paranoid drift of those who level the charge.  It would make slightly more sense to claim that Obama is a secret al-Qaeda operative, inasmuch as his policies are good for bringing recruits into the al-Qaeda fold.  But those policies are continuations of George Bush’s, and no one is paranoid enough to deem that hapless but villainous soul a double agent.

On the other hand, the idea that Obama is a secret Republican would explain a great deal.  His capitulations and displays of spinelessness, along with his lack of principled conviction, helped bring Republicans to power in the House of Representatives and in many state houses and legislatures.  Moreover, the policies he pursues have been, if anything, to the right of those favored by “moderate Republicans” back in the days before that species went extinct.  But then, of course, it wouldn’t just be Barack Obama who is a secret Republican.  The same could be said for almost the entire Democratic Party at the national level at least since Bill Clinton set the party on its rightward drifting course.

The claim that they are all Republicans, secret or not, expresses a certain truth, notwithstanding the fact that it is literally false.  We know it is false not because it doesn’t make sense of what we observe, but because all the evidence points the other way.

What this shows is not just that conspiracy theories can be true in a sense, even when they are wrong; it also shows that party identifications no longer indicate what democratic theory, in all its many varieties, maintains they should.

The seeds were sown long ago and they took root and thrived as the Cold War wore on.  But it was not until the consolidation of the so-called Reagan Revolution that real democracy all but disappeared from our political life.  We still have competitive elections, and probably always will.  But from that point on, competing parties – the two, semi-official ones — no longer operated in the way that justifying theories of democratic institutions claim they should.

They ceased to be vehicles through which the people or their representatives, aiming at a common good, engage in public deliberation and collective decision-making.  Instead, they became marketing agencies, bought and paid for by corporate interests, selling legislators eager to do their paymasters’ bidding to different (though fluid and sometimes intersecting) constituencies, and to a “moderate” middle, comprising less than 20% of a depoliticized and acquiescent electorate.

As marketers, Republicans and Democrats tailor their respective messages to different blocs of voters.  Republicans tailor theirs to their hardcore base, voters bereft of informed and considered judgment but full of passionate intensity.   Democrats tailor theirs to the apolitical middle.  This is why the celebrated “enthusiasm gap” of 2010 developed, but it may be a winning strategy in the presidential election this time around, given the field of Republican candidates.  Could there be a conspiracy among Republicans to play into Obama’s hands by fielding only dolts?  Not likely, of course; but that conspiracy theory too would explain a great deal.

* * *

In 2008, the financiers and corporate moguls who own both the Democratic and Republican Parties threw their weight behind Barack Obama.  No doubt, most of them would have preferred a Republican; hard as they have tried, Democrats have yet to win over the hearts and minds of our most nefarious “economic royalists.”  But the movers and shakers of our corrupted system, many of them, at least had the wits to realize that popular disgust with the criminality and incompetence of the Bush administration made Republicans more difficult than Democrats to sell even to an acquiescent electorate.

But that doesn’t explain why Obama got more Wall Street and corporate support than Hillary Clinton.  To answer that question, another conspiracy theory suggests itself – one that is more plausible than any of the ones suggested so far, though of course it too is literally false.

It was no secret, except perhaps to his most ardent and deluded supporters, that Obama was vetted and deemed fit to carry corporate America’s banner.   But Hillary Clinton was heir to a family tradition of doing precisely that, and she made no bones about her intentions.  Why not her?

Were our titans of finance and industry more clever than they actually are, and better able to collude, they might have reasoned as follows: “Hillary Clinton is the devil we know.  We can count on her.  But she is even less charismatic than her husband, and he still elicits more enmity than admiration.  On the other hand, Barack Obama is a Rorschach figure upon whom voters eager for “change” – in other words, eager to be rid of us — can pin their hopes.  Moreover, his appeal to the 18 to 25 demographic, and to people of color, is evident.  Therefore he can do what she cannot — disillusion an entire generation along with everyone else who can be rallied to his cause.  Now, what we need to fatten our purses and generally to have our way is a quiescent and therefore acquiescent citizenry.  This Obama is uniquely able to deliver, since nothing fosters quiescence better than disillusionment and cynicism.  Therefore, let us make him our man.”

Until last month, it looked like these imaginary conspirators were on to something, that their reasoning was sound.   Then the world changed.

The events last winter and spring in Wisconsin, Ohio, Maine and elsewhere, important as they were, were only a prelude to what has developed over the past four weeks as indignation again took hold of an awakened citizenry, this time in the belly of the capitalist beast – at Zuccotti Park, within spitting distance of Wall Street.  From there it has spread to countless cities throughout the United States.  At last, we in the Land of the Free – can one say those words these days without irony? –  have done what our brothers and sisters in north Africa and southern Europe and elsewhere, victims of the system in place, have been doing for months – renewing the struggle for equality and justice.

Try as Obama Democrats and their colleagues in the liberal commentariat might, the Occupy movement is not about to go away, and while it may interact constructively with the Democratic Party from time to time, it is not going to allow itself to be coopted by it.  Occupy Wall Street has yet to name the Obama administration an enemy; maybe it never will.  But its dynamic is at odds with the politics Obama, along with all his predecessors for more than three decades, has pursued.

And so Obama, who has failed every constituency that supported him in 2008, has also failed the constituency that sustains him and that he cares about most, the tiny fraction of the top 1% who plotted (not literally, of course) to make him the champion of their interests.  Yes, Obama has worked tirelessly in their behalf — beyond all expectations.   But when it came to promoting acquiescence he turned out to be a bust.

To be sure, the conspirators got what they thought they wanted.  Obama did disillusion multitudes, just as they expected he would.  But he did this by being “bipartisan” to a fault, and since his electoral competition was nothing if not obstinate, that meant ceding everything to them.  Meanwhile, the Republicans had decided that the way forward for them was to bring Obama down, and that the way to do that was to win back Wall Street and corporate America by offering them everything they could dream of and more, enlightened self-interest be damned.  And so it was, in one of those world-changing ironies of history, that Obama, the “change” president, helped make the prevailing situation so intolerable that the long overdue fight back finally came.

What the consequences will be is still unclear and is likely to remain so for a while.  All we can say for now is that politics, the real thing, is back, and that neither Wall Street and corporate America nor our decrepit political class will ever quite be the same.

To be sure, the capitalism that brought about our present sorry state is not about to give way to anything radically better any time soon; and, thanks to Mitt Romney or someone even more risible, Obama probably will win a second term.  But the alliance between corporate America and the American government that has deformed our democracy so profoundly is now shaken.  It may well be in its final days.

If Occupy Wall Street continues on its present track, as it shows every sign of doing, the short-term changes it brings can only be for the good.  As for what happens beyond the short term, all we know for sure is that the future is open and the possibilities endless.  In Greece, where they’ve been fighting back against even more rapacious banks than the ones afflicting our 99% for longer than we have, a general strike is now underway!  Who would have thought it possible?  Wall Street conspirators beware!

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.

How Did Jesus Go From Being a Socialist in the New Testament to a Selfish Ayn Rand Anarcho-capitalist?

by mark karlin on Wed, 08/17/2011 

How did Jesus go from being a socialist in the New Testament to a selfish Ayn Rand anarcho-capitalist in modern-day America? After all, one of the most well-known bible verses is from Mark 10:25: "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God."

Sociologist Gregory Paul stated the paradox clearly in an August 12 Washington Post op-ed:

Many conservative Christians, mostly Protestant but also a number of Catholics, have come to believe and proudly proclaim that the creator of the universe favors free wheeling, deregulated, union busting, minimal taxes especially for wealthy investors, plutocrat-boosting capitalism as the ideal earthly scheme for his human creations. And many of these Christian capitalists are ardent followers of Ayn Rand, who was one of - and many of whose followers are - the most hard-line anti-Christian atheists you can get. Meanwhile many Christians who support the capitalist policies associated with social Darwinistic strenuously denounce Darwin's evolutionary science because it supposedly leads to, well, social Darwinism!

But Paul points out that the New Testament primarily promotes what would nowadays be called socialism:

But to understand just how non-capitalistic Christianity is supposed to be we turn to the first chapter after the gospels, Acts, which describes the events of the early church. Chapters 2 and 4 state that all "the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need ... No one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they shared everything they had.... There were no needy persons among them. From time to time those who owned lands or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles' feet, and it was distributed to anyone as he had need."

Now folks, that's outright socialism of the type described millennia later by Marx - who likely got the general idea from the gospels.

Paul further notes that "we have Christian creationists like Jay Richards writing books titled Money, Greed, and God: Why Capitalism Is the Solution and Not the Problem. Can a stranger amalgam of opposing opinions be devised?"

In essence, the modern prosperity theologians who dominate the right wing of the Republican Party are essentially heretics. They've grafted on a post-industrial-age emphasis on the acquisition of capital and material goods to the alleged son of God, Jesus, who was himself essentially the father of socialism (as recounted in the bible).

At the next Republican debate, we would like to see a test of faith. All the candidates should be required to thread a camel through the eye of a needle.

If they can't do it, they have to shut up about Jesus, Christianity and the bible.

Now that would be refreshing.

Rick Perry Doubled Texas’ Debt, Claimed it was a Balanced Budget Through Accounting Gimmicks

By Marie Diamond on Jul 6, 2011 ThinkProgress

"for sale" would have been more appropriate

Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) and Republican lawmakers completely failed to keep their promise not to “kick the can” down the road when it came to solving the largest budget shortfall in the state’s history. That’s according to a new Associated Press report, which concludes that Perry and the GOP legislature largely balanced the state’s budget through flimsy accounting gimmicks that do nothing to secure Texas’ financial footing.

The self-professed fiscal conservatives resorted to tactics like delaying a $2.3 billion payment to schools by one day to technically push it into the next fiscal year and keep it off the books of this budget. They also “found” $800 million by ordering the state’s accountants to forecast a faster increase in land values to show more property tax income:

Gov. Rick Perry signed a budget that was balanced only through accounting maneuvers, rewriting school funding laws, ignoring a growing population and delaying payments on bills coming due in 2013.

It accomplishes, however, what the Republican majority wanted most: It did not raise taxes, took little from the Rainy Day Fund and shifted any future deficits onto the next Legislature.

The new budget also preposterously assumes there will be no growth in the number of school children in Texas, even though it is one of the fastest-growing states in the nation. Experts predict this trick alone will shortchange school districts by $2 billion.

Texas lawmakers had to close an enormous $27 billion budget deficit this year. Amazingly, only about a third of it was caused by the economic downturn. The state has had a chronic shortage of revenue after years of slashing property and business taxes and creating numerous tax breaks and exemptions. Conservative governors have slashed state services to the bone, so there was no more fat to cut from the budget.

As governor for over a decade, Perry’s “fiscal conservatism” has doubled the state’s debt from $13.7 billion in 2001 to $34.08 billion in 2009. He’s refused to raise taxes on the wealthy and brags about not dipping into the state’s substantial Rainy Day Fund. (However, Perry’s fellow Texas Republicans claim Perry has appropriated nearly all the money in the Rainy Day Fund, and have asked him to stop claiming that he preserved it.)

Democrats have fought back against the GOP claim that it was truly a balanced budget. “It’s all smoke and mirrors and misdirection,” said state Rep. Garnett Coleman (D).

Gingrich finance team quits as campaign faces $1 million debt

By David Edwards | RAW
Tuesday, June 21st, 2011

A comeback for Republican presidential candidate appeared less likely Tuesday as two more high level staffers reportedly departed with the campaign carrying at least $1 million in debt.

Fundraising director Jody Thomas and fundraising consultant Mary Heitman both resigned, according to The Associated Press.

The setback comes less than two weeks after 16 other staffers quit en masse.

Officials told the AP that the campaign was facing more than $1 million in debt, which Gingrich may be forced to personally cover if he wishes to continue.

Recent reports have also said that the campaign did not have cash on hand for the $25,000 Ames Straw Poll filing fee or $30,000 for a list of previous Iowa caucus atendees.

Gingrich said last week that he would continue his quest for the Republican nomination "no matter what it takes."

"Newt 2012 continues its reorganization and alignment as a grassroots driven, substantive, solutions-oriented campaign," spokesman R.C. Hammond said Tuesday.

Gingrich recently returned from an extended vacation cruise around the islands of Greece. He left for that cruise after his scathing criticism of the House Republican Medicare invited a barrage of conservative attacks that damaged his prospects.

Rick Perry: "God Crashed Economy, To Return Us To Biblical Principles"

(Oh...it's God's fault because He's mad at us...OK, right. This guy wanted to secede from the Union a year ago over "Obamacare." Now, he wants to be president? Uh, fuck you, Perry!

Say it with me: "NO MORE DOUCHEBAGS!  NO MORE DOUCHEBAGS!"--jef)

God Crashed Economy

By Matthew Desmond

– June 14, 2011

Texas Governor Rick Perry

In an interview last month, Texas Governor Rick Perry explained how the economic crisis is part of God’s plan, to return us to biblical principles. Gov. Perry has expressed some interest in running for President in 2012, and polled voters nationwide in January to see how he would do.

Governor Perry has taken criticism recently for his budget which would lay off 100,000 teachers, as well as the fact that he invited other Governors to an anti-gay prayer event.

In 2009 Gov. Perry publicly refused stimulus money, then secretly used stimulus money to balance his budget.

In April of this year, when Texas was facing massive wildfires, he publicly criticized the Obama Administration for not helping his state, even though he was receiving federal funding to help fight the fires.

Via Think Progress;

During an appearance on James Robison’s Life Today television program, Perry says he sees a silver lining to the devastating recession that has cost millions of families their jobs, homes, and livelihoods: it will return America to “Biblical principles” and free us from the slavery of big government:

PERRY: I think in America from time to time we have to go through some difficult times — and I think we’re going through those difficult economic times for a purpose, to bring us back to those Biblical principles of you know, you don’t spend all the money. You work hard for those six years and you put up that seventh year in the warehouse to take you through the hard times. And not spending all of our money. Not asking for Pharaoh to give everything to everybody and to take care of folks because at the end of the day, it’s slavery. We become slaves to government.

Watch it:

He said "revivalness." He really did.

Not Resting on Their Laurels, Wisconsinites Establish Walkerville

(Fight the good fight!--jef)

Monday, June 6, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

by Kristine Mattis

 

MADISON, Wisconsin -- After the huge wave of protests throughout February and March, the focus of activists in Wisconsin moved to the impending recall elections this summer. The winter actions erupted as a result of an anti-union bill which threatened to remove essentially all collective bargaining rights for public employees as well as hamstring unions by requiring the almost impossible tasks of annual recertification and individual opt-in dues collecting. In response, besides assembling in numbers reaching nearly one-hundred thousand, Wisconsin citizens amassed signatures on petitions to facilitate the recall of numerous state senators who had voted for Governor Walker’s duplicitous legislation.

In the past two months, though a presence of protesters has remained - with their t-shirts, buttons, signs, banners, vuvzelas – around the vicinity of the capitol building, it appeared the united front of thousands had waned. Groups still came to meet for solidarity sing-a-longs and to attend governmental committee hearings on the many new regressive, pro-corporate, anti-human bills being forwarded by the Wisconsin legislature. But with the recall elections on the horizon and with the recent small victory of the Dane County circuit court dismissing the anti-collecting bargaining law (as it had been passed so hastily as to not adhere to common legislative requirements), it appeared that Wisconsinites might be done with the fight, resting on their own laurels and those of the Democrats they hoped to elect via the recall.

 

Walkerville, WisconsinOf course, the corporate media, who operate under the same anti-human system that fosters plutocracy and redistribution of wealth from the many to the few, would like nothing better than to make it appear that all is “back to normal” in the cheese state. So, perhaps few people outside of Wisconsin and even outside of Madison realize that we were serious when we said that this was not a protest but a movement. There is much yet to be accomplished.

As of 7pm on Saturday, June 4th, a diverse group of citizens, representing unionists, non-union workers, students, teachers, immigrants, farmers, families and people with no formal affiliation (save for being a part of the empathetic class who truly seeks liberty and justice for all) laid down their tents and founded “Walkerville” around the perimeter of the Wisconsin capitol building. With a nod to the Hooverville tent cities of the Great Depression, these activists are demonstrating that we are not only opposed to the aforementioned anti-union bill, but that we are opposed to the entire regressive budget of this state, which wholly removes the rights and social safeties for the most vulnerable members of our society and shifts all of the state’s bounty to the wealthiest and most anti-social corporate oligarchs. The police state enacted by the Walker administration has severely hampered the lawful and peaceful assembly of citizens in our own statehouse, so Walkerville exists to re-establish the constant presence and occupation by the people of the state, whose voice is being muted within the capitol.

Most importantly, Walkerville demonstrates that we in Wisconsin are not going to let up. Just as we are being attacked on all fronts as citizens, we will be fighting back on all fronts. Though the Democrats in our state legislature have stepped up to the plate and helped to support the will of the people, it is unlikely that they would have done so had their feet not been held to the fire. If we had not gathered in the capitol clearly proclaiming our will, our presence, and our solidarity, it is not clear the state Democrats would have had the impetus to help us fight. Thus we know that simply electing new officials will never be enough to ensure justice for the people from the government.

States like New York and California serve as prime examples of how the Democratic agenda is just as corporate as the Republican. Governor Andrew Cuomo, the son of a man once considered one of the strongest liberals in NY State history, is promoting many of the same brutal and unnecessary cuts to education and poverty programs. The underserved of California are faring no better under Jerry Brown. If we citizens fail to realize that we must pressure ALL politicians of all politician affiliations, and we must be prepared to fight indefinitely against the bipartisan corporate takeover of our local, state, and federal our government, we are sure to lose.

Walkerville signifies the fortitude of the Wisconsin people, and the recognition that our struggles as citizens are not soon to end. Our actions may take new forms or may morph as they are reassessed for utility, but they are far from over.

For those of us in Wisconsin who cannot camp out day and night around the capitol but still want to volunteer with the movement, there are numerous opportunities to be present for more protests and actions against the state budget, which will be negatively affecting all of us. (See Defend Wisconsin for full details.) For those in other states who will likely see similar developments, please know that we are still fighting, as you will surely have to fight too. The more we acknowledge that this struggle against the ruling class will be ongoing, that it affects us all, and that we may not ever be able to “return to normal,” the more likely we may have a fighting chance for our future.

Chopped: Education, Labor, and Health and Human Services

Tuesday, April 12, 2011 by Washington Post
Budget deal: Cuts of $38 billion include accounting gimmicks, target Obama priorities
by Philip Rucker

WASHINGTON - More than half of the $38 billion in spending cuts that lawmakers agreed to last week in the 2011 budget compromise that averted a government shutdown would hit education, labor and health programs.

Although the pain would be felt across virtually the entire government — the deal includes a $1 billion across-the-board cut shared among all non-defense agencies — Republicans were able to focus the sharpest cuts on areas they have long targeted. The Education, Labor, and Health and Human Services departments, which represent about 28 percent of non-defense discretionary spending, face as much as a combined $19.8 billion, or 52 percent, of the total reductions in the plan. Funding for federal Pell grants, job training and a children’s health-care initiative would face cuts, senior congressional aides said. A multitude of other programs — from highway and high-speed rail projects to rural development initiatives — also would experience significant reductions.

But some of the worst-sounding trims are not quite what they seem, and officials said they would not necessarily result in lost jobs or service cutbacks. In several cases, what look like large reductions are actually accounting gimmicks.

The legislation includes $4.9 billion from the Justice Department’s Crime Victims Fund, for instance, but that money is in a reserve fund that wasn’t going to be spent this year. Crime victims would receive no less money than they did before the deal.

The bill contains some policy provisions, including language preventing Guantanamo Bay detainees from being transferred into the United States for any purpose. And it eliminates funding for four Obama administration “czars”: the “health care czar,” “climate change czar,” “car czar” and “urban affairs czar.” But those positions are already vacant, and Democrats beat back a GOP effort to defund other “czar” positions.

Republicans were able to terminate more than 55 programs in the areas of health, labor and education, resulting in a total savings of more than $1 billion. In addition, two minor components of President Obama’s health-care law will be eliminated: the Consumer Operated and Oriented Plan and the Free Choice Voucher programs.

The bill would cut U.S. contributions to the United Nations and international organizations by $377 million, and to international banks and financial institutions by $130 million. It also would prohibit pay raises for foreign service officers, although other federal employees would not be affected.

The Washington region would be spared from potentially painful cuts to the Metro system, as the budget measure would fully fund the federal government’s $150 million share of the agency’s budget, congressional sources said.

But District officials are livid about some policy provisions attached to the bill, particularly one that would ban federal and local funding for abortion. Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) and several members of the D.C. Council led a rally Monday on Capitol Hill to protest those provisions and were arrested.

The full extent of the cuts did not become clear until Tuesday morning, after congressional aides worked all weekend and all day Monday to shape a detailed spending plan based on the framework that Obama and congressional leaders agreed to Friday. Budget aides tallied cuts into the evening Monday, racing to prepare a bill that was introduced in the House.

(A summary of the cuts provided by the House Appropriations Committee is available here, and a detailed list of program cuts is here.)

Of the $38 billion in overall reductions in the budget that funds the government for the rest of the fiscal year, about $20 billion would come from domestic discretionary programs, while $17.8 billion would be cut from mandatory programs. The latter cuts, known as “ChIMPS,” affect permanent programs protected by law. The money they lose this year could be put back in their budgets next year.

House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) hailed the historic nature of the spending cuts in a statement Tuesday morning.

“My committee went line-by-line through agency budgets this weekend to negotiate and craft deep but responsible reductions in virtually all areas of government,” Rogers said. “Our bill targets wasteful and duplicative spending, makes strides to rein in out-of-control federal bureaucracies and will help bring our nation one step closer to eliminating our job-crushing level of debt.”

Although the pain would be felt across virtually the entire government — the deal includes a $1 billion across-the-board cut shared among all non-defense agencies — Republicans were able to focus the sharpest cuts on areas they have long targeted. The Education, Labor, and Health and Human Services departments, which represent about 28 percent of non-defense discretionary spending, face as much as a combined $19.8 billion, or 52 percent, of the total reductions in the plan.

In addition, the Environmental Protection Agency, long a target of conservatives, will see a $1.6 billion cut, representing a 16 percent decrease from 2010 levels. At the Department of the Interior, affected agencies include the Fish and Wildlife Services ($141 million cut from last year), the National Park Service ($127 million cut from last year) and “clean and drinking water state revolving funds” ($997 million cut from last year).

Democrats were able to beat back the most severe cuts originally proposed by House Republicans and protect funding for some cherished programs, such as Head Start, AmeriCorps and the implementation of the new health-care and food safety laws.

“Race to the Top,” Obama’s signature education reform initiative, will receive an additional $700 million in funding. In addition, the Securities and Exchange Commission received a $74 million increase from 2010 levels, which will help fund new securities enforcement measures.

But Democrats agreed to key concessions in important areas and were not able to reduce military spending.

White House press secretary Jay Carney said Monday that the deal demonstrates “a commitment to making tough choices that are not the kinds of choices in an ideal world the president would want to make or that Democrats would want to make.”

Less-painful cuts

Some of the cuts may have only a limited effect on people’s daily lives. The Crime Victims Fund provides money — for counseling and other services — that comes from fees levied on criminals, according to U.S. officials and victims’ advocates. By law, all the money collected must be spent on victims. But Congress has limited the amount that can be spent each year, allowing excess money to grow in a reserve account. Those savings constitute the $4.9 billion listed as a cut, advocates and officials said.

“It would be a disaster for crime victims if this were really a cut,” said Susan Howley, director for public policy at the National Center for Victims of Crime.

The bill includes savings of nearly $500 million on the federal Pell grant program, which aids low-income college students. But those savings are reflected in an administration plan already underway to limit grants to the academic year to preserve the maximum grant amount of $5,550.

The year-round component “was costing more money than was originally anticipated and was not having a noticeable effect” on completion rates, Education Department spokesman Justin Hamilton said.

Another cut, $3.5 billion for the Children’s Health Insurance Program, would affect only rewards for states that make an extra effort to enroll children. But officials with knowledge of the budget deal said that most states were unlikely to qualify for the bonuses and that sufficient money would be available for those that did.

And about $2.2 billion would be cut from the COOPS program, a provision of the new health-care law that subsidizes loans to civic and community groups that come together to create health insurance cooperatives. This represents more than one-third of the program’s $6 billion budget.

‘We’re on a battleship’

Most lawmakers will not discuss the specifics of the spending cuts until a final analysis is revealed. But Rep. George Miller (Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the House Education and the Workforce Committee, issued a statement after the deal was announced Friday saying that he “had concerns.”

“Poor and middle-class families have already received more than their fair share of pain in this economy while the wealthy and special interests have paid no price,” he said.

The House and the Senate plan to vote on the budget bill this week. Some conservative lawmakers have said they will not support it. Many freshmen House Republicans — who had resisted backing down from the GOP proposal of $61 billion in cuts — said they will remain undecided until they have a chance to read the measure.

“I’m not sure that this agreement will look quite as good under the light of day,” said freshman Rep. Bill Huizenga (Mich.). “We’re on a battleship. The wheel has been turned. And I understand that. I get that. I just want to make sure that we’ve turned the wheel all the way.”

It remains unclear how deep a conservative backlash might be — 54 House Republicans voted against a short-term spending bill earlier this year, many arguing that it did not contain deep enough cuts. Privately, though, Republican leadership aides said the legislation would almost certainly pass when it comes to the House floor on Wednesday.

Across the Capitol, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), a freshman tea party adherent, issued an open letter to fellow senators saying he would vote against the bill because it is “simply not credible or serious.”

“Think about it another way before you vote: The entire budget cut [skims] 3 percent off the top of our historic $1.65 trillion deficit. That means the side of Big Government got 97 percent of what they want,” Paul wrote. “I prefer to be on the other side. The side of the people who sent us here to Washington to do something. To cut spending.”

The legislation is not expected to include funding for an alternative engine for the Joint Strike Fighter program, according to a source with knowledge of the decision. The Ohio district of House Speaker John A. Boehner (R) stands to gain from the costly and controversial defense project.

The budget bill also will not include the more controversial policy provisions, or “riders.” Republican efforts to defund Planned Parenthood and peel back environmental regulations led to a stalemate last week.

Other policy riders kept out of the final bill include efforts to prevent regulation of the for-profit college industry and to defund Obama’s health-care law and National Public Radio. But the bill does include provisions that would limit NASA’s cooperation with China and that would remove wolves from the endangered species list in Montana, something Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) had been seeking.

The deal also includes several other concessions Republicans sought. It guarantees that the Senate will debate and vote on repealing Obama’s health-care law and ending federal funding to Planned Parenthood. That’s designed to force politically vulnerable lawmakers to vote on the hot-button issues. The legislation also would block a funding increase, sought by the administration, for the Internal Revenue Service to hire additional agents to enforce the administration’s agenda on a range of issues.

Gingrich says he cheated on his wives because he felt so ‘passionately’ for ‘this country’

(SCUMBAG! That's the worst excuse I've ever heard! The truth is, his first two wives got seriously ill, and Gingrich was out of there, rather than standing by either of his sick wives. If there is a hell, there is a special place being saved there for ol' Scumbag Newt.--jef)

++++

Newt Gingrich is a Sorry Sack of Shit
By David Edwards
Wednesday, March 9th, 2011

Newt Gingrich (R-GA) loves the country so much that it has caused him to stray from his marriages.

At least, that what the former House speaker seemed to be saying in a recent interview with CBN's David Brody.

"There's no question at times of my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked far too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate," Gingrich said.

"What I can tell you is that when I did things that were wrong, I wasn't trapped in situation ethics, I was doing things that were wrong, and yet, I was doing them," he said.

Gingrich has been married three times and divorced twice.

His second wife, Marianne, revealed to Esquire last year how the former speaker had presented his first wife with the terms of their divorce while she was in the hospital recovering from surgery for uterine cancer in 1980.

Rumors about Gingrich's fondness for oral sex with other women have circulated for some time. A 1995 Vanity Fair profile explained how Anne Manning had claimed she had been intimate with him.

In 1999, over the Mother's Day weekend and on the same day his second wife had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, Gingrich informed her he had found someone else.

In fact, he had reportedly been having an affair with Callista Bisek for six years.

Gingrich divorced his second wife in 2000 and married Callista that same year.

The Georgia Republican has launched a website to take donations for a possible 2012 presidential bid, but he will have to work hard to get conservative votes.

"He's the last person I'd vote for for president of the United States," Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) told the Tulsa World in August. "His life indicates he does not have a commitment to the character traits necessary to be a great president."

Gingrich "doesn't know anything about commitment to marriage," he added.

Business lobbyist not so sure GOP takeover a done deal

By Ed Henry, CNN Senior White House Correspondent - September 22, 2010

Washington (CNN) -- Top White House officials believe expectations were set so low for Democrats that they just may keep control of the House and Senate by grinding out victories in individual races, and there are signs emerging that the most powerful Republican business lobbyist may privately agree with that assessment.

CNN has learned that Tom Donohue, the powerful president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce who has vowed to spend more than $75 million on key House and Senate races, has privately told colleagues in recent weeks he believes Democrats will just barely hold on to the House majority.

Two sources familiar with the conversations said Donohue has privately said he's gone over every single key race in the House, and he believes Republicans will lose a few seats -- losses he believes they don't see coming -- because it is more of an anti-establishment election than an anti-Democratic election.

Chamber spokesman JP Fielder told CNN he could not comment on private conversations Donohue may or may not have had, but stressed that this election season has already been highly unpredictable.

"If there's anything we learned from last week, it's that many surprises lay ahead in this election cycle," Fielder said in reference to the Senate primary results in Delaware, in which Republican Christine O'Donnell shocked the political world by using Tea Party support to defeat moderate Rep. Mike Castle.

Perhaps Donohue is just trying to temper Republicans' high expectations. On the other side of the aisle, top Democrats like Vice President Biden may be trying to manage expectations as well.

In August, Biden publicly all but guaranteed that Democrats will keep their majorities in the House and Senate during remarks at a Democratic National Committee meeting in St. Louis, Missouri.

"If it weren't illegal, I'd make book on it," the vice president quipped.

But CNN has learned that in recent weeks Biden and President Obama each paid quiet visits that were not on their public schedules to former Sen. Bob Dole, R-Kansas, who is recuperating from surgery at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington.

Obama is from a different generation and never served in the Senate with Dole, and CNN was told his visit on August 30 was respectful but quick. The president was at Walter Reed to visit wounded troops a day in advance of his Oval Office address on Iraq, and he stopped by to wish Dole well.

But Dole told CNN the president hinted about the deep partisan divide he is facing, which is only expected to increase after the election, when there is likely to be either Republican control or Democratic control with slimmer majorities.

"He was kidding me, 'I wish you were in the Senate now,' " recalled Dole, who was known for working across the aisle despite his staunch Republican credentials.

Biden, as is his way, was a bit more talkative than Obama and stayed with Dole for an hour and 15 minutes during a separate visit earlier this month.

"You know Old Joe, once he gets going," Dole said jokingly.

The two men served together in the Senate for decades, and Dole said they had time to commiserate about the upcoming midterm elections. Biden didn't back down from his promise of Democratic victories, but he seemed to suggest the obvious: Holding both majorities will be an uphill battle.

As Dole put it, "I think he knows they have a big fence to climb."

Biden spokesman Jay Carney confirmed the meeting with Dole, but stressed there is no change from what Biden has said previously.

Carney noted the vice president has "always said this midterm election year was going to be tough and that Democrats should not take anything for granted," which is why last week he went to Delaware to campaign for Senate candidate Chris Coons, even though many pundits have predicted the Democrat will beat O'Donnell easily.

"There is absolutely no difference between what the vice president has been saying about the midterms in public and what he says in private," Carney said. "In public and in private, he says the same thing: 'It's going to be tough, but Democrats are going to win.' I wouldn't think it's a surprise that Sen. Dole, a former Republican leader, is emphasizing the 'going to be tough' part, but this is what the vice president says all the time."

Mitt Romney's Profoundly Screwed-Up Economic Ideology

Mitt Romney is the most credible of all the likely Republican presidential candidates. He’s right to focus on the economy, but his specifics are loony.
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog
Posted on August 25, 2010

Mitt Romney is smart enough not to join Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin in using the proposed mosque at Ground Zero to to lauch a presidential bid. While Gingrich is busy comparing Muslims to Nazis (“Nazis don’t have the right to put up a sign next to the holocaust museum in Washington”), and Palin is calling on New Yorkers to “refudiate” the plan (she subsequently corrected her word choice), Romney is offering an economic plan.

That’s a wise choice. Mitt knows Americans don’t care about mosques in Manhattan. They care about money in their own mitts.

Romney is intent on selling himself to America as the businessman who can turn the country around (sad to say, unemployment is likely to remain high all the way through November, 2012). Unlike Palin and Gingrich, Romney did, after all, run a business (yes, it was a firm that bought and sold companies and laid off lots of people along the way but, hey, that’s business).

So we should take Romney’s economics seriously. In today’s (Wednesday’s) Boston Globe op-ed Romney attacks Obama’s economic policies for being ineffective and calls for what he calls a “growth and jobs” agenda. Here are the main points:

– match U.S. corporate taxes with those of other developed economies,

– preserve the Bush tax cuts for everyone, “especially small business,”

– allow businesses to write off capital investments made in 2010 and 2011 rather than over time,

– eliminate taxes on investment dividends,

– eliminate taxes on capital gains and interest for households earning less than $250,000 a year, and

– balance the federal budget.

Apart from the impossibility of simultaneously cutting taxes and balancing the budget without taking a meat cleaver to Social Security, Medicare, and defense spending (Romney delicately sidesteps this conundrum by urging we “reshape government programs” and “restructure entitlements”), his policies raise a more fundamental problem.

Call it the wet-noodle problem.

For Romney, the key to America’s recovery is to cut taxes on businesses and on people who invest in them. These steps, he says, are the “conditions that enable businesses of all sizes to grow and thrive.” In other words, if businesse get more capital at less cost, they’ll create jobs.

But anyone looking closely at the American economy today would see this is nonsense. American corporations have an unprecedented $1.8 trillion of cash. The Fed, meanwhile, has slashed interest rates to essentially zero – a record low – and is still holding over $2 trillion in securities that it said last week it will keep from shrinking. And a Federal Reserve survey released earlier this week showed that banks have been making it easier for businesses of all sizes to get loans. Credit standards for small firms have been loosened for the first time since late 2006.

In other words, businesses have all the capital they need. They’re sitting on it or can borrow it more cheaply than ever. But they aren’t using it to create jobs.

Why not? Because there’s not enough demand for their products or services. Consumers aren’t buying.

Retail sales continue to slide. Wal-Mart, Home Depot, and Target report disappointing sales. Same with popular back-to-school retailers like Aeropostale, American Eagle Outfitters, and TJX. Housing sales are down. Appliances are down. (Cars sales are up a bit but that’s mainly because they fell to record lows in 2008 and 2009, and by now some people who have held back need another.)

Romney’s supply-side economics won’t create jobs. It’s pushing on a wet noodle. Businesses create jobs only if consumers are pulling the noodle from the other end.

These days, businesses are raising profits by cutting costs (mostly by laying off even more workers), shifting operations abroad wherever they can find consumers (China, Brazil, India), and buying up their own shares of stock. Romney’s tax breaks will only hasten all this.

If Mitt Romney really wanted to increase American jobs and not just corporate profits he’d understand why consumers aren’t buying, and focus his proposals there.

The first reason they’re not buying is they’re still carrying a huge debt load. Mortgage debt is still engulfing millions of families. Americans also owe some $826.5 billion in revolving credit, mostly on credit cards (credit card debt was $975.7 billion in September 2008, so they still have a long way to go). On top of that, outstanding student loans (both federal and private) total some $829.7 billion.

So instead of boosting corporate profits, let Americans reorganize their mortgage debt in personal bankruptcy, protect them from credit card companies that charge gargantuan interest on credit card debt, and give their kids more direct aid for college.

The second reason consumers aren’t buying is their nest eggs have shrunk down to the size of peas. Homes are still worth 20 to 40 percent less than in 2007, and 401(k)s are down 20 percent. Baby boomers now have to save for retirement big time.

So instead of a giving corporations a tax break on their incomes, and giving investors tax breaks on dividends and capital-gains, cut the payroll tax for ordinary Americans. 80 percent of Americans pay more in payroll taxes than in income taxes, and it’s a regressive tax. Eliminate payroll taxes on the first $20K of income and make up the difference by raising the cap on income subject to payroll taxes (now about $106,000).

The third reason consumers aren’t buying is they’ve lost their jobs or are scared of losing them, or can only find part-time jobs that pay less. And because most families rely on two wage earners, the chance that at least one of them has lost or is in danger of losing a paycheck is double. That means families have no choice but to economize.

So instead of giving tax breaks to companies for buying more machines to replace their workers, make big profitable companies pay severance to any worker they lay off, equal to a month’s salary times the number of years worked. And require that any corporations receiving government contracts and subsidies (including defense contractors) use the money to create jobs in the United States.

Mitt Romney is the most credible of all the likely Republican presidential candidates. He’s right to focus on the economy, and he’s to be commended for coming up with specifics. But his specifics are loony. Romney’s wet-noodle economics won’t create American jobs.

Forcing Real Filibusters, not just "intents"

So, they don't even have to filibuster anymore. The have an "intent to filibuster" , and that's it? They don't even have to filibuster, just threaten to? Our lawmakers is comprised (compromised, maybe?) of intellectual pussies...



Fixing the Senate by Forcing Real Filibusters

By Karen Tumulty / Washington

We've been hearing a lot lately about the evils of the filibuster, particularly in the weeks since the Massachusetts Senate election in January deprived the Democrats of the 60th vote that it takes to block one. "The Republicans' indiscriminate use of the filibuster has made it all but impossible to conduct everyday business in the Senate. On an almost daily basis, the Republican minority — just 41 Senators — stops bills from even coming to the floor for debate and amendment," Democratic Senator Tom Harkin wrote recently in the Huffington Post. "In the 1950s, an average of one bill was filibustered in each two-year Congress. In the last Congress, 139 bills were filibustered. The Republican abuse of the filibuster is unprecedented, routine, and increasingly reckless." (See 10 embarrassing things that didn't stop Americans from getting elected.)

So it is no surprise that there are calls from Harkin and others to reform the procedures of the Senate — changing the rules to lower the number of votes it would take to invoke cloture and bring a filibuster to an end. 

That's not going to happen. Democrats are well aware that control of the Senate has changed hands six times in the past 30 years; knowing that they are likely to be in the minority again someday, Democrats themselves are loath to give up the power to gum up the works. (Watch TIME's video "The Filibuster and You: An Odd Todd Cartoon.")

But there is an answer here. It's not fewer filibusters; it's more of them. And by that I mean real filibusters — something we haven't seen for quite a while in the Senate. 

Anyone expecting the classic scene from Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, in which Jimmy Stewart talks until he collapses, should drop by the Senate Chamber during what passes for a filibuster these days. The place is usually all but empty. The only sound is the voice of a clerk droning through a slow roll call of the names of absent Senators. More often than not, even the filibusterer himself is nowhere to be seen. (See the top 10 unfortunate political one-liners.)

 

It has been more than two decades since the last time we saw the majority actually make the minority put up or shut up on a filibuster. In 1988, while attempting to shut down a Republican filibuster of campaign finance reform legislation, then majority leader Robert Byrd even went so far as to invoke a power that hadn't been used since 1942: he dispatched the Senate sergeant-at-arms to arrest missing Senators and escort them to the floor. Oregon's Bob Packwood was carried onto the floor at 1:19 a.m., after a scuffle in which he attempted to jam his office door and ended up reinjuring a broken finger. Byrd didn't give up until a record-setting eighth cloture vote failed to end the debate. (See 10 GOP congressional contenders.)

That we don't see these kinds of episodes nowadays has more to do with convenience than anything else. As congressional scholar Norman Ornstein once told me, "You have a different Senate now. Frankly, they're soft. If they had the backbone and the discipline to do it, it would work." 

To force a filibuster, the majority has to keep a quorum of 51 at the ready. That means telling its members: Sorry, guys, you won't be making it to that fundraiser tonight. And a real filibuster also uses up a lot of time, which can be a problem at the end of a session when there is a lot of must-pass legislation, like spending bills, needed to keep the government operating. (See the top 10 outrageous earmarks.)

But early in the year — which is where we are now — forcing a real filibuster could be a useful exercise, one that makes a point far more effectively than all the whining we are hearing about Republican abuse of the rules. If what the majority is offering is a bill that the public really wants, there will be a price to pay for talking it to death. There will be a reason to actually try to work out the differences between the two sides. Even if the Democrats ultimately lose, the voters will at least understand what the fight was all about. And maybe, just maybe, the minority will think twice before they launch the next filibuster. (See the TIME/CNN series Broken Government.)

As retiring Senator Evan Bayh wrote in an Op-Ed in this past Sunday's New York Times, "Those who obstruct the Senate should pay a price in public notoriety and physical exhaustion. That would lead to a significant decline in frivolous filibusters." Sadly, such clarity of vision about the institution seems to come only to Senators when they are on their way out the door.