 This Is Liberalism?  : Information Clearing House - ICH
This Is Liberalism?
By David Michael Green
February 22, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- You gotta hand it to the agents of the regressive right for playing the weakest imaginable hand so well.
I’m talking about the Lee Atwaters and Frank Luntzs of the world, who both understand human psychology (read fear) and are absolutely pitiless about employing it for purposes of assisting the rich and powerful in raping the rest of us.
If you can get past the absolute amoral viciousness of these sociopaths, you have to admire their handiwork at some level. (Oh, wait a minute: correction. Lee Atwater actually did apologize for some of his crimes against humanity. Of course, it was on his death bed.)
These guys are good. They understand the necessity of remaking the world when the actual one we live in would never dream of embracing their destructive initiatives. These guys could not only sell ice to Eskimoes, they could peddle dirt to an ant colony. They could market garbage at the county dump. They could sell crap to the local sewer district.
We know this, because they do it all the time. The entire regressive agenda is based on lies, most of them both whopping in scale and utterly transparent to any remotely sentient human being. How, then, has it succeeded so well these last thirty years? There are many answers to that question, including, especially, the collapse in confidence of alternative ideologies, the wholesale, marked-down-today-only, outright purchase of the Democratic Party by corporate interests, and the stunning derogation of duty by the mainstream media. But one key answer involves the work of these masters at the marketing of deceit.
And one of their greatest achievements has been to pick up the whole ideological playing field and move it about a thousand miles to the right. This is what I mean by remaking reality. They’ve created a whole new normal. And in this new normal, anything to the left of Dick Cheney is liberal, if not far left. And that, of course, includes the hated Barack Obama sitting like some squatter in their White House.
As it happens, I hate Barack Obama, too. And my reasons for doing so are piling up fast. But I would never mistake him for a liberal. And that, in fact, is one of the things I most despise about this disastrous fool of a president. I couldn’t possibly care less what happens to him, other than hoping for fate to return the favor after all he’s done (and, especially, failed to do) to the country he promised to rescue. But I do care about progressivism (or liberalism, if one prefers – I typically avoid that term now that the Atwaters and Luntzs have turned it into something slightly less hated than pedophilia), and I’m furious that this pathetic president and his horrid little whorehouse of a political party, who are about as liberal as George W. Bush was, are taking down the political ideas I care about with their own sinking ship.
By not refuting the false accusations that he is a liberal or even a socialist, and by running an abysmal presidency, Obama has done as much as the scum on the right in service to wrecking a set of ideas that are not only noble and correct, but are desperately needed now by a country imploding under the weight of the regressive politics which has been ascendant for thirty years now. Worst of all – and quite by design – Americans are forgetting what any sort of progressive politics would even actually look like. Orwell understood the significance of this phenomenon so well he made it the existential nightmare of his protagonist, Winston Smith. All Winston wanted to do was to hold onto some sense of a tangible reality. O’Brien, his torturer, showed him what happens when power not only wants to win battles, but better yet end them forever by eliminating the very opposing ideas people might embrace.
In that spirit, it’s well to remember what a progressive America might actually look like, and how different that is from the botched abortion of bogus liberalism that is supposed to be Democratic Party policy today.
Let’s start with what the Democrats – who, after all, control the government – should have started with: the economy. People are miserable and frightened today because they have so much job insecurity. The so-called liberals in Washington provided them with a ‘jobs summit’ as a remedy. And then there was that amazing stimulus bill that was one-third tax cut sop for Republicans (who still wouldn’t vote for it), mostly otherwise pork barrel legislation for the benefit of members of Congress, and still too small anyhow to do much good. The right has been apoplectic ever since, calling it the socialist takeover of America. Hell, it wasn’t even remotely liberal. A real progressive solution would have been big, and would have involved government spending to stimulate the economy and create jobs, either directly on the government payroll, or through incentives to the private sector. In reality, the Democratic plan has failed to revive the economy – not because it was progressive but, quite the contrary, because it wasn’t remotely so.
The same is true with respect to what got us into this mess. Conservative catechism teaches that regulation is evil. Like Satan. And Saddam. Real progressives understand that it is entirely necessary. Take it away and greedy pigs masquerading as human beings will sell their own children for a buck, discounting them on a volume deal if you buy the whole brood. Even after the experience of the Great Depression, regressive predators couldn’t satiate their greed enough, so they dismantled the regulatory structure of the mid-twentieth century that had brought prosperity to so many Americans. That old system was real liberalism, ladies and gentlemen. Calling what Obama or Bill Clinton have done by that name is an insult to the intelligence of people everywhere (even in America, where it is so scarce). Clinton was absolutely no less a friend to corporate America than Ronald Reagan, and Obama has made zero serious attempt to outlaw the very practices that got us into the economic nightmare we’re digging out from now, while simultaneously rescuing the Wall Street pigs from the destructive fruits of their own greed. That’s liberal? Who messed with my dictionary while I was napping?
The same is true of government spending. Obama is now proposing cuts to federal spending, a pretty unliberal thing to do. He wants all those cuts to come from the domestic side, and none at all from an astonishingly bloated military budget that dwarfs the combined total of every other country in the world. A real progressive would spend money on people, not on more weapons crack to feed the ‘defense’ contractors’ insatiable addictions. Now Obama is pushing his ‘bipartisan’ deficit-cutting commission, to be led by Erskine Bowles, a Clinton hack, and Alan Simpson, a Reagan-era regressive whack job. Guess how that’s gonna turn out?
Look at what supposedly constitutes ‘socialized medicine’ for another great example of the total disconnect between rhetoric and reality that regressive mythmakers have so successfully fabricated. The Democratic plan is a complete exercise in idiocy for one reason and one reason only. It twists itself into pretzel-like contortions in order to avoid confronting the simple basic problem at the core of the country’s health care woes: the useless and parasitic private insurance industry inserted between the public and their health care delivery. These racketeers provide absolutely no value added whatsoever, but suck up one-third of every dollar spent on health care. What a coincidence that we spend about exactly that much more per capita than any other country in the world, and still die younger. A progressive plan would do what almost every other developed country has successfully done for decades, and simply nationalize health care. What the supposedly liberal/socialist Democrats are doing instead is proposing to massively expand the great insurance scam by forcing thirty or forty million Americans to buy insurance from these profiteers or get fined for failing to do so. Sorry. That’s about as liberal as the electric chair. And about as health-inducing too.
Energy policy provides another great example. Big Daddy Liberal in the White House is running around the country nowadays flacking for nuclear power, proposing billions in federal loan guarantees to underwrite a dangerous technology that is not even economically feasible without government assistance. Jackson Browne must be spinning in his grave, and he’s not even dead yet. If nuclear power is the liberal answer to energy questions, then Sarah Palin is a giant of political philosophy. But since Palin, The Great Defender Against Rampaging Ruskies, couldn’t tell Putin from pet food, non-zombies amongst us can also agree that a liberal energy policy would look a lot more like a giant national effort to develop alternative fuel sources than the reinvigoration of the one kind of energy production liberals absolutely hate the most.
The question of civil liberties provides another spot-on example. Remember how the elder Bush won office by trashing his hapless opponent as a card-carrying member of the ACLU? Well, this White House has made almost no serious departures from the human rights horrors promulgated by Junior Bush. Obama says we don’t torture. Guess what? So did Bush. Obama says he wants to close Guantánamo, but hasn’t. Guess what? So did the Cowboy Caligula. Obama has also kept and in some cases extended a plethora of the Texas Torquemada’s policies, ranging from indefinite detention to rendition for sub-contracted torture to state secrets to executive authority and beyond. For all this – which is nearly identical to the little shop of horrors that Cheney ran – Obama’s ‘liberal’ national security policies are being regularly trashed by regressives as left-wing capitulation to terrorists, not least by the monster himself, Dick “Dick” Cheney. You have to be insane to think this is liberalism. I guarantee you they’re not popping champagne corks in the ACLU offices across the country in celebration of the new respect-for-civil-liberties sheriff come to town.
It’s true that Obama and the Democrats have talked about ending Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. That’s pretty impressive, eh? They’re so liberal that they’re now, er, coming up right behind Colin Powell, Bob Gates and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Now there’s a crop o’ radical lefties for you. You could organize a pretty good Maoist revolutionary cell with that lot, I’ll tell ya. And, of course, the emphasis remains on the term “talked about”. That’s all he’s done so far. Obama also talked about closing Gitmo. In fact, he promised us he would do it in a year. Didn’t happen. He talked about bringing new transparency to Washington, especially in the health care negotiations. Didn’t happen. He talked about leaning on the Israelis to stop building settlements in the West Bank. They just built more and he did nothing. Are you getting the picture here? Obama talking about civil rights for gays literally puts him on the same moral and ideological plane as Dick Cheney, who – because his daughter is a lesbian – actually has similar politics on this issue as the current president. Do I need to mention that Ol’ Dick is not the most liberal fellow to be found in America?
But speaking of liberals, do you remember them ever clamoring for more war? Remember back in the Nam days. Weren’t the liberals on the side of ending the war? Remember in 2003. Weren’t liberals trying to block the Bush thugs from invading Iraq? This president has massively escalated the American military presence in Afghanistan, while also significantly increasing the use of drone missile attacks in Pakistan. Maybe I need to lay off the Boone’s Farm for a little while, ‘cause I’m feeling kinda confused. I always thought the liberals were the anti-war crowd.
We could go on and on here, folks. The current Democratic government in Washington bears no resemblance whatsoever to liberalism. We know this, because we know what a real progressive government would actually do. It would spend a pile of money to create jobs and stimulate the economy. It would regulate economic actors so that they served the public interest or were instead promptly disappeared. It would create a universal, publicly-funded, national health care plan. It would launch a major initiative to create a new alternative energy industry. It would resurrect the Bill of Rights and restore human rights to the American legal system. It would act immediately to guarantee that all people were subject to equal treatment, regardless of their sexual orientation. It would be searching for political solutions to the conflict in Afghanistan and bringing troops home, rather than escalating the war.
This is what real liberalism would look like in America today, and this is not remotely comparable to what the so-called liberals in Washington are actually doing. None of it is, let alone all of it.
It’s really quite amazing. First, because of how regressive Obama has turned out to be. In all honesty, I cannot think of a single serious policy or action by this president that could be genuinely called liberal, with perhaps the possible exception of reversing the Republican clamp-down on stem cell research and on overseas abortion counseling (yet he’s also been simultaneously selling out abortion rights at home in legislating the health care debacle). I mean it. Obama may be a stylistic breath of fresh air after Bush (but, then, a rotting corpse would be, too) – but substantively, he’s little short of W’s third term. In fact, Bush was even more progressive than Obama if you compare their two signature health care initiatives. One of those two guys came up with a plan to massively increase government-provided benefits to the public. (Shhh! That’s called socialism.) Guess, what? It wasn’t Obama.
But what’s really amazing is how Obama is broadly perceived as being a liberal. This is just yet another framing victory by the right, and one of stunning proportions. By erroneously tagging Obunkster with the bleeding-heart liberal moniker, they manage to simultaneously tear him down, make liberalism unpalatable to the public, and shift the center of political gravity so far starboard that even a right-wing president like Obummer and his band of Democratic merry men become unacceptable because they are insufficiently regressive.
Like I said, you have to admire these guys for their craft. You know. Just like you have to admire the Holocaust for its good ol’ German efficiency.
Meanwhile, though, it’s scary that America has so little in the way of a real progressive option in our politics.
It’s scary that those politicians who are today widely considered to be liberal are in fact mostly deeply regressive.
And it’s scary that we keep following the same right-wing prescriptions, decade in and decade out, even though they have done nothing but wreck the planet, wreck the country, and wreck the lives of individual Americans.
But what is really scary is that we are now losing the capacity to even contemplate what a progressive set of politics would look like. These ideas are now so marginalized that people increasingly can’t even conceive of them anymore.
Orwell would be horrified.
Comrade O’Brien would be very proud indeed.
David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his articles (dmg@regressiveantidote.net ), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond. More of his work can be found at his website, www.regressiveantidote.net .
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Behind Obama’s overtures to Republican right
“Bipartisan” campaign targets US working class
By Patrick Martin
18 February 2010
The Obama administration is announcing Thursday a new initiative for joint action by the Democratic Party and the Republican Party against American working people, when the leaders of a new bipartisan commission to slash the federal deficit are introduced at the White House.
Obama has selected Democrat Erskine Bowles, a banker and former White House chief of staff in the Clinton administration, and Republican Alan Simpson, a retired senator from Wyoming, to head the new commission. It will have a mandate to propose major cuts in entitlement programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, as well as regressive taxes such as a national sales tax or value-added tax, targeting working class consumers rather than the wealthy.
Under plans outlined by White House officials, Obama will select six commission members, four Democrats and two Republicans, while congressional Democratic and Republican leaders will select six members apiece. Given that the Democrats control both houses of Congress by large majorities, a narrow 10-8 Democratic majority on the 18-member commission is already a major concession to the ultra-right, and insures that tax increases on the wealthy will be excluded from consideration.
Congressional Republicans blocked the establishment of the panel by legislation when they successfully filibustered the proposal in the Senate. This means that the commission’s recommendations will not be binding on either house of Congress. Even the lesser step of creating the commission by executive order could be stalled if congressional Republicans refuse to nominate their six members.
While the commission’s formation has been slowed by political posturing in advance of the 2010 congressional elections, there is broad agreement in both big business parties that drastic measures must be taken to slash the major social spending programs.
Senator Simpson, 78, served three terms from 1979 to 1997, and for a time chaired the Senate subcommittee that oversees the Social Security program. He was chosen for his willingness to tackle what once was described as the “third rail” of American politics, cutting Social Security expenditures, by raising the age of eligibility for retirement and cutting benefit levels.
In an interview with the Washington Post on the eve of his appointment to co-chair the commission, Simpson virtually spat out his hatred of any government program that guarantees basic necessities. “How did we get to a point in America where you get to a certain age in life, regardless of net worth or income, and you’re ‘entitled’?” he asked. “The word itself is killing us.”
Erskine Bowles was an investment banker on Wall Street and then in his native North Carolina, where he was a major fundraiser for Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 presidential campaign. He served in a series of White House posts, including deputy chief of staff in 1994-95, and chief of staff in 1996-97, when he negotiated a budget-cutting agreement with the Republican-controlled Congress. He was defeated in two campaigns as the Democratic candidate for US Senate in North Carolina, where he ran as a right-wing “fiscal conservative.”
Bowles is currently on the board of directors of Morgan Stanley, one of the big five Wall Street investment houses. He was a director of General Motors from 2005 until its bankruptcy last year. The two companies were among the main beneficiaries of the Obama administration’s financial bailouts.
Bowles served as chairman of the compensation committee at both companies, and still holds that position at Morgan Stanley, making him the point man for the awarding of eight-figure salaries and bonuses to the executives of both companies.
That such an individual is now the Democratic leader on a commission targeting the Social Security and Medicare benefits of working people speaks volumes about the class character of the Democratic Party and of the Obama administration—and about the arrogance of the White House, which clearly assumes that there will be no outcry in official circles over naming a Wall Street paymaster to supervise the cutting of essential benefits for working people.
The purpose of the commission is to review, behind closed doors and insulated from any political pressure from below, a range of measures to slash the federal budget deficit, which is expected to hit a record $1.556 trillion in the current fiscal year, and remain well above $1 trillion for the next several years. The government deficit as a percentage of national GDP will be well over 10 percent, approaching the level of such debt-ravaged countries as Greece.
The New York Times published a lengthy analysis Wednesday warning that failure of Democrats and Republicans in Washington to significantly reduce the deficit could lead to “a day of fiscal reckoning … hastened by a deep recession that cost trillions of dollars in lost tax revenues and higher spending for safety-net programs.”
In a telephone interview with the Times, Simpson declared, “There isn’t a single sitting member of Congress—not one—that doesn’t know exactly where we’re headed.” Both entitlement spending cuts and restructuring of the tax system were required, he said.
The Times suggested that an agreement would not be possible “unless Mr. Obama breaks his campaign promise not to raise taxes for households making less than $250,000.” In other words, the tax increases will target working people, not the multi-millionaires and billionaires whose manipulation of the financial system triggered the worldwide economic crisis.
The same article concedes that cuts in social benefits are deeply unpopular. A CBS/New York Times poll published the same day found that “by a two-to-one ratio Americans oppose cutting health care and education.”
This reality is what underlies the increasing calls for “bipartisanship.” The financial aristocracy is demanding measures that are widely opposed by the American people and cannot be imposed through “normal” democratic means. Hence the demand that the two parties that serve the wealthy should drop their posture of mutual hostility and join forces against the vast majority of the population.
Behind the push for deficit reduction is the concern that escalating US deficits will produce a major decline in the value of the dollar, or even provoke foreign investors and countries to unload their holdings of dollar-denominated assets, threatening the unique position of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.
The Times cited new studies—financed by big business think tanks—recommending that Obama and Congress “send a strong signal to global markets by agreeing this year to a package of both long-term tax increases and spending reductions, especially in the popular entitlement programs…”
Two top officials of the Federal Reserve, the US central bank, spoke out in the past week warning of the threat of growing deficits. Thomas M. Hoenig, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, in a speech February 16, said: “It seems inevitable that a government turns to its central bank to bridge budget shortfalls, with the result being too-rapid money creation and eventually, not immediately, high inflation.”
Six days earlier, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Richard W. Fisher, said that tolerance of China and other big overseas holders of US debt was not unlimited. “We cannot count forever on the largess or the misfortune of others to mask our own imbalances here at home—for fiscal profligacy in Washington today hinders our ability to address fiscal challenges tomorrow.”
The failure of the Obama administration and congressional Republicans to reach agreement on the deficit reduction commission was a major reason given by Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana for announcing his retirement Monday after three terms. The 54-year-old Democrat withdrew from a reelection campaign for which he had already amassed $13 million, without giving advance warning of more than a few hours to either the White House or his Senate Democratic colleagues.
In his withdrawal statement, Bayh criticized both the White House and Senate Democratic leaders and called for greater efforts to reach agreement with the Republicans. Bayh has long stood on the right wing of the Democratic caucus in the Senate, voting with the Republicans more frequently than any other Democrat. Despite, or rather because of, this well-established right-wing position, Bayh was one of the top candidates to be Obama’s running mate in 2008, although he was passed over in favor of Joseph Biden.
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Published by the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI)
Behind Obama’s overtures to Republican right
“Bipartisan” campaign targets US working class
By Patrick Martin
18 February 2010
The Obama administration is announcing Thursday a new initiative for joint action by the Democratic Party and the Republican Party against American working people, when the leaders of a new bipartisan commission to slash the federal deficit are introduced at the White House.
Obama has selected Democrat Erskine Bowles, a banker and former White House chief of staff in the Clinton administration, and Republican Alan Simpson, a retired senator from Wyoming, to head the new commission. It will have a mandate to propose major cuts in entitlement programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, as well as regressive taxes such as a national sales tax or value-added tax, targeting working class consumers rather than the wealthy.
Under plans outlined by White House officials, Obama will select six commission members, four Democrats and two Republicans, while congressional Democratic and Republican leaders will select six members apiece. Given that the Democrats control both houses of Congress by large majorities, a narrow 10-8 Democratic majority on the 18-member commission is already a major concession to the ultra-right, and insures that tax increases on the wealthy will be excluded from consideration.
Congressional Republicans blocked the establishment of the panel by legislation when they successfully filibustered the proposal in the Senate. This means that the commission’s recommendations will not be binding on either house of Congress. Even the lesser step of creating the commission by executive order could be stalled if congressional Republicans refuse to nominate their six members.
While the commission’s formation has been slowed by political posturing in advance of the 2010 congressional elections, there is broad agreement in both big business parties that drastic measures must be taken to slash the major social spending programs.
Senator Simpson, 78, served three terms from 1979 to 1997, and for a time chaired the Senate subcommittee that oversees the Social Security program. He was chosen for his willingness to tackle what once was described as the “third rail” of American politics, cutting Social Security expenditures, by raising the age of eligibility for retirement and cutting benefit levels.
In an interview with the Washington Post on the eve of his appointment to co-chair the commission, Simpson virtually spat out his hatred of any government program that guarantees basic necessities. “How did we get to a point in America where you get to a certain age in life, regardless of net worth or income, and you’re ‘entitled’?” he asked. “The word itself is killing us.”
Erskine Bowles was an investment banker on Wall Street and then in his native North Carolina, where he was a major fundraiser for Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 presidential campaign. He served in a series of White House posts, including deputy chief of staff in 1994-95, and chief of staff in 1996-97, when he negotiated a budget-cutting agreement with the Republican-controlled Congress. He was defeated in two campaigns as the Democratic candidate for US Senate in North Carolina, where he ran as a right-wing “fiscal conservative.”
Bowles is currently on the board of directors of Morgan Stanley, one of the big five Wall Street investment houses. He was a director of General Motors from 2005 until its bankruptcy last year. The two companies were among the main beneficiaries of the Obama administration’s financial bailouts.
Bowles served as chairman of the compensation committee at both companies, and still holds that position at Morgan Stanley, making him the point man for the awarding of eight-figure salaries and bonuses to the executives of both companies.
That such an individual is now the Democratic leader on a commission targeting the Social Security and Medicare benefits of working people speaks volumes about the class character of the Democratic Party and of the Obama administration—and about the arrogance of the White House, which clearly assumes that there will be no outcry in official circles over naming a Wall Street paymaster to supervise the cutting of essential benefits for working people.
The purpose of the commission is to review, behind closed doors and insulated from any political pressure from below, a range of measures to slash the federal budget deficit, which is expected to hit a record $1.556 trillion in the current fiscal year, and remain well above $1 trillion for the next several years. The government deficit as a percentage of national GDP will be well over 10 percent, approaching the level of such debt-ravaged countries as Greece.
The New York Times published a lengthy analysis Wednesday warning that failure of Democrats and Republicans in Washington to significantly reduce the deficit could lead to “a day of fiscal reckoning … hastened by a deep recession that cost trillions of dollars in lost tax revenues and higher spending for safety-net programs.”
In a telephone interview with the Times, Simpson declared, “There isn’t a single sitting member of Congress—not one—that doesn’t know exactly where we’re headed.” Both entitlement spending cuts and restructuring of the tax system were required, he said.
The Times suggested that an agreement would not be possible “unless Mr. Obama breaks his campaign promise not to raise taxes for households making less than $250,000.” In other words, the tax increases will target working people, not the multi-millionaires and billionaires whose manipulation of the financial system triggered the worldwide economic crisis.
The same article concedes that cuts in social benefits are deeply unpopular. A CBS/New York Times poll published the same day found that “by a two-to-one ratio Americans oppose cutting health care and education.”
This reality is what underlies the increasing calls for “bipartisanship.” The financial aristocracy is demanding measures that are widely opposed by the American people and cannot be imposed through “normal” democratic means. Hence the demand that the two parties that serve the wealthy should drop their posture of mutual hostility and join forces against the vast majority of the population.
Behind the push for deficit reduction is the concern that escalating US deficits will produce a major decline in the value of the dollar, or even provoke foreign investors and countries to unload their holdings of dollar-denominated assets, threatening the unique position of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.
The Times cited new studies—financed by big business think tanks—recommending that Obama and Congress “send a strong signal to global markets by agreeing this year to a package of both long-term tax increases and spending reductions, especially in the popular entitlement programs…”
Two top officials of the Federal Reserve, the US central bank, spoke out in the past week warning of the threat of growing deficits. Thomas M. Hoenig, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, in a speech February 16, said: “It seems inevitable that a government turns to its central bank to bridge budget shortfalls, with the result being too-rapid money creation and eventually, not immediately, high inflation.”
Six days earlier, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Richard W. Fisher, said that tolerance of China and other big overseas holders of US debt was not unlimited. “We cannot count forever on the largess or the misfortune of others to mask our own imbalances here at home—for fiscal profligacy in Washington today hinders our ability to address fiscal challenges tomorrow.”
The failure of the Obama administration and congressional Republicans to reach agreement on the deficit reduction commission was a major reason given by Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana for announcing his retirement Monday after three terms. The 54-year-old Democrat withdrew from a reelection campaign for which he had already amassed $13 million, without giving advance warning of more than a few hours to either the White House or his Senate Democratic colleagues.
In his withdrawal statement, Bayh criticized both the White House and Senate Democratic leaders and called for greater efforts to reach agreement with the Republicans. Bayh has long stood on the right wing of the Democratic caucus in the Senate, voting with the Republicans more frequently than any other Democrat. Despite, or rather because of, this well-established right-wing position, Bayh was one of the top candidates to be Obama’s running mate in 2008, although he was passed over in favor of Joseph Biden.
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Copyright © 1998-2010 World Socialist Web Site - All rights reserved
Monday, February 15, 2010
AlterNet: The Economic Elite Have Engineered an Extraordinary Coup, Threatening the Very Existence of the Middle Class
AlterNet: The Economic Elite Have Engineered an Extraordinary Coup, Threatening the Very Existence of the Middle Class
The Economic Elite Have Engineered an Extraordinary Coup, Threatening the Very Existence of the Middle Class
By David DeGraw, Amped Status
Posted on February 15, 2010, Printed on February 15, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/145667/
"The American oligarchy spares no pains in promoting the belief that it does not exist, but the success of its disappearing act depends on equally strenuous efforts on the part of an American public anxious to believe in egalitarian fictions and unwilling to see what is hidden in plain sight." -- Michael Lind, To Have and to Have Not
We all have very strong differences of opinion on many issues. However, like our founding fathers before us, we must put aside our differences and unite to fight a common enemy.
It has now become evident to a critical mass that the Republican and Democratic parties, along with all three branches of our government, have been bought off by a well-organized Economic Elite who are tactically destroying our way of life. The harsh truth is that 99 percent of the U.S. population no longer has political representation. The U.S. economy, government and tax system is now blatantly rigged against us.
Current statistical societal indicators clearly demonstrate that a strategic attack has been launched and an analysis of current governmental policies prove that conditions for 99 percent of Americans will continue to deteriorate. The Economic Elite have engineered a financial coup and have brought war to our doorstep...and make no mistake, they have launched a war to eliminate the U.S. middle class.
To those who feel I am using extreme rhetoric, I ask you to please take a few minutes of your time to hear me out and research the evidence put forth. The facts are there for the unprejudiced, rational and reasoned mind to absorb. It is the unfortunate reality of our current crisis.
Unless we all unite and organize on common ground, our very way of life and the ideals that our country was founded upon will continue to unravel.
Before exposing exactly who the Economic Elite are, and discussing common sense ways in which we can defeat them, let's take a look at how much damage they have already caused.
Casualties of Economic Terrorism, Surveying the Damage
The devastating numbers across-the-board on the economic front are staggering. I'll go through some of them here, many we have already become all too familiar with. We hear some of these numbers all the time, so much so that it appears as if we have already begun "to normalize the unthinkable." You may be sick of hearing them, but behind each number is an enormous amount of individual suffering, American lives and families who are struggling worse than they ever have.
America is the richest nation in history, yet we now have the highest poverty rate in the industrialized world with an unprecedented amount of Americans living in dire straights and over 50 million citizens already living in poverty.
The government has come up with clever ways to downplay all of these numbers, but we have over 50 million people who need to use food stamps to eat, and a stunning 50 percent of U.S. children will use food stamps to eat at some point in their childhoods. Approximately 20,000 people are added to this total every day. In 2009, one out of five U.S. households didn't have enough money to buy food. In households with children, this number rose to 24 percent, as the hunger rate among U.S. citizens has now reached an all-time high.
We also currently have over 50 million U.S. citizens without health care. 1.4 million Americans filed for bankruptcy in 2009, a 32 percent increase from 2008. As bankruptcies continue to skyrocket, medical bankruptcies are responsible for over 60 percent of them, and over 75 percent of the medical bankruptcies filed are from people who have health care insurance. We have the most expensive health care system in the world, we are forced to pay twice as much as other countries and the overall care we get in return ranks 37th in the world.
In total, Americans have lost $5 trillion from their pensions and savings since the economic crisis began and $13 trillion in the value of their homes. During the first full year of the crisis, workers between the age of 55 - 60, who have worked for 20 - 29 years, have lost an average of 25 percent off their 401k. "Personal debt has risen from 65 percent of income in 1980 to 125 percent today." Over five million U.S. families have already lost their homes, in total 13 million U.S. families are expected to lose their home by 2014, with 25 percent of current mortgages underwater. Deutsche Bank has an even grimmer prediction: "The percentage of 'underwater' loans may rise to 48 percent, or 25 million homes." Every day 10,000 U.S. homes enter foreclosure. Statistics show that an increasing number of these people are not finding shelter elsewhere, there are now over 3 million homeless Americans, the fastest-growing segment of the homeless population is single parents with children.
One place more and more Americans are finding a home is in prison. With a prison population of 2.3 million people, we now have more people incarcerated than any other nation in the world -- the per capita statistics are 700 per 100,000 citizens. In comparison, China has 110 per 100,000, France has 80 per 100,000, Saudi Arabia has 45 per 100,000. The prison industry is thriving and expecting major growth over the next few years. A recent report from the Hartford Advocate titled "Incarceration Nation" revealed that "a new prison opens every week somewhere in America."
Mass Unemployment
The government unemployment rate is deceptive on several levels. It doesn't count people who are "involuntary part-time workers," meaning workers who are working part-time but want to find full-time work. It also doesn't count "discouraged workers," meaning long-term unemployed people who have lost hope and don't consistently look for work. As time goes by, more and more people stop consistently looking for work and are discounted from the unemployment figure. For instance, in January, 1.1 million workers were eliminated from the unemployment total because they were "officially" labeled discouraged workers. So instead of the number rising, we will hear deceptive reports about unemployment leveling off.
On top of this, the Bureau of Labor Statistics recently discovered that 824,000 job losses were never accounted for due to a "modeling error" in their data. Even in their initial January data there appears to be a huge understating, with the newest report saying the economy lost 20,000 jobs. TrimTabs employment analysis, which has consistently provided more accurate data, "estimated that the U.S. economy shed 104,000 jobs in January."
When you factor in all these uncounted workers -- "involuntary part-time" and "discouraged workers" -- the unemployment rate rises from 9.7 percent to over 20 percent. In total, we now have over 30 million U.S. citizens who are unemployed or underemployed. The rarely cited "employment-participation" rate, which reveals the percentage of the population that is currently in the workforce, has now fallen to 64 percent.
Even based on the "official" unemployment rate, just to get back to the unemployment level of 4.6 percent that we had in 2007, we need to create over 10 million new jobs, and most every serious economist will tell you that these jobs are not coming back. In fact, we are still consistently shedding jobs, on just one day, January 27, several companies announced new cuts of more than 60,000 jobs.
Due to the length of this crisis already, millions of Americans are reaching a point where the unemployment benefits they have been living on are coming to an end. More workers have already been out of work longer than at any point since statistics have been recorded, with over six million now unemployed for over six months. A record 20 million Americans qualified for unemployment insurance benefits last year, causing 27 states to run out of funds, with seven more also expected to go into the red within the next few months. In total, 40 state programs are expected to go broke.
Most economists believe the unemployment rate will remain high for the foreseeable future. What will happen when we have millions of laid-off workers without any unemployment benefits to save them?
Working More for Less
The millions struggling to find work are just part of the story. Due to the fact that we now have a record high six people for every one job opening, companies have been able to further increase the workload on their remaining employees. They have been able to increase the amount of hours Americans are working, reduce wages and drastically cut back on benefits. Even though Americans were already the most productive workers in the world before the economic crisis, in the third quarter of 2009, average worker productivity increased by an annualized rate of 9.5 percent, at the same time unit labor cost decreased by 5.2 percent. This has led to record profits for many companies. Of the 220 companies in the S&P 500 who have reported fourth-quarter results thus far, 78 percent of them had "better-than-expected profits" with earnings 17 percent above expectations, "the highest for any quarter since Thomson Reuters began tracking data."
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the national median wage was only $32,390 per year in 2008, and median household income fell by 3.6 percent while the unemployment rate was 5.8 percent. With the unemployment rate now at 10 percent, median income has been falling at a 5 percent rate and is expected to continue its decline. Not surprisingly, Americans' job satisfaction level is now at an all-time low.
There are also a growing number of employed people who, despite having a job, are still living in poverty. There are at least 15 million workers who now fall into this rapidly growing category. $32,390 a year is not going to get you far in today's economy, and half of the country is making less than that. This is why many Americans are now forced to work two jobs to provide for their family to hopefully make ends meet.
A Crime Against Humanity
The mainstream news media will numb us to this horrifying reality by endlessly talking about the latest numbers, but they never piece them together to show you the whole devastating picture, and they rarely show you all the immense individual suffering behind them. This is how they "normalize the unthinkable" and make us become passive in the face of such a high causality count.
Behind each of these numbers, is a tremendous amount of misery; the physical toll is only outdone by the severe psychological toll. Anyone who has had to put off medical care, or who couldn't get medical care for one of their family members due to financial circumstances, can tell you about the psychological toll that is on top of the physical suffering. Anyone who has felt the stress of wondering how they were going to get their child's next meal or their own, or the stress of not knowing how they are going to pay the mortgage, rent, electricity or heat bill, let alone the car payment, gas, phone, cable or Internet bill.
There are now well over 150 million Americans who feel stress over these things on a consistent basis. Over 60 percent of Americans now live paycheck to paycheck.
These are all basic things every person should be able to easily afford in a technologically advanced society such as ours. The reason we struggle with these things is because the Economic Elite have robbed us all. This amount of suffering in the United States of America is literally a crime against humanity.
This is Part I of David DeGraw's report, "The Economic Elite vs. People of the USA. " AlterNet will run Part II in the coming days.
Read more of David DeGraw's work on Amped Status.
© 2010 Amped Status All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/145667/
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The Economic Elite Have Engineered an Extraordinary Coup, Threatening the Very Existence of the Middle Class
By David DeGraw, Amped Status
Posted on February 15, 2010, Printed on February 15, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/145667/
"The American oligarchy spares no pains in promoting the belief that it does not exist, but the success of its disappearing act depends on equally strenuous efforts on the part of an American public anxious to believe in egalitarian fictions and unwilling to see what is hidden in plain sight." -- Michael Lind, To Have and to Have Not
We all have very strong differences of opinion on many issues. However, like our founding fathers before us, we must put aside our differences and unite to fight a common enemy.
It has now become evident to a critical mass that the Republican and Democratic parties, along with all three branches of our government, have been bought off by a well-organized Economic Elite who are tactically destroying our way of life. The harsh truth is that 99 percent of the U.S. population no longer has political representation. The U.S. economy, government and tax system is now blatantly rigged against us.
Current statistical societal indicators clearly demonstrate that a strategic attack has been launched and an analysis of current governmental policies prove that conditions for 99 percent of Americans will continue to deteriorate. The Economic Elite have engineered a financial coup and have brought war to our doorstep...and make no mistake, they have launched a war to eliminate the U.S. middle class.
To those who feel I am using extreme rhetoric, I ask you to please take a few minutes of your time to hear me out and research the evidence put forth. The facts are there for the unprejudiced, rational and reasoned mind to absorb. It is the unfortunate reality of our current crisis.
Unless we all unite and organize on common ground, our very way of life and the ideals that our country was founded upon will continue to unravel.
Before exposing exactly who the Economic Elite are, and discussing common sense ways in which we can defeat them, let's take a look at how much damage they have already caused.
Casualties of Economic Terrorism, Surveying the Damage
The devastating numbers across-the-board on the economic front are staggering. I'll go through some of them here, many we have already become all too familiar with. We hear some of these numbers all the time, so much so that it appears as if we have already begun "to normalize the unthinkable." You may be sick of hearing them, but behind each number is an enormous amount of individual suffering, American lives and families who are struggling worse than they ever have.
America is the richest nation in history, yet we now have the highest poverty rate in the industrialized world with an unprecedented amount of Americans living in dire straights and over 50 million citizens already living in poverty.
The government has come up with clever ways to downplay all of these numbers, but we have over 50 million people who need to use food stamps to eat, and a stunning 50 percent of U.S. children will use food stamps to eat at some point in their childhoods. Approximately 20,000 people are added to this total every day. In 2009, one out of five U.S. households didn't have enough money to buy food. In households with children, this number rose to 24 percent, as the hunger rate among U.S. citizens has now reached an all-time high.
We also currently have over 50 million U.S. citizens without health care. 1.4 million Americans filed for bankruptcy in 2009, a 32 percent increase from 2008. As bankruptcies continue to skyrocket, medical bankruptcies are responsible for over 60 percent of them, and over 75 percent of the medical bankruptcies filed are from people who have health care insurance. We have the most expensive health care system in the world, we are forced to pay twice as much as other countries and the overall care we get in return ranks 37th in the world.
In total, Americans have lost $5 trillion from their pensions and savings since the economic crisis began and $13 trillion in the value of their homes. During the first full year of the crisis, workers between the age of 55 - 60, who have worked for 20 - 29 years, have lost an average of 25 percent off their 401k. "Personal debt has risen from 65 percent of income in 1980 to 125 percent today." Over five million U.S. families have already lost their homes, in total 13 million U.S. families are expected to lose their home by 2014, with 25 percent of current mortgages underwater. Deutsche Bank has an even grimmer prediction: "The percentage of 'underwater' loans may rise to 48 percent, or 25 million homes." Every day 10,000 U.S. homes enter foreclosure. Statistics show that an increasing number of these people are not finding shelter elsewhere, there are now over 3 million homeless Americans, the fastest-growing segment of the homeless population is single parents with children.
One place more and more Americans are finding a home is in prison. With a prison population of 2.3 million people, we now have more people incarcerated than any other nation in the world -- the per capita statistics are 700 per 100,000 citizens. In comparison, China has 110 per 100,000, France has 80 per 100,000, Saudi Arabia has 45 per 100,000. The prison industry is thriving and expecting major growth over the next few years. A recent report from the Hartford Advocate titled "Incarceration Nation" revealed that "a new prison opens every week somewhere in America."
Mass Unemployment
The government unemployment rate is deceptive on several levels. It doesn't count people who are "involuntary part-time workers," meaning workers who are working part-time but want to find full-time work. It also doesn't count "discouraged workers," meaning long-term unemployed people who have lost hope and don't consistently look for work. As time goes by, more and more people stop consistently looking for work and are discounted from the unemployment figure. For instance, in January, 1.1 million workers were eliminated from the unemployment total because they were "officially" labeled discouraged workers. So instead of the number rising, we will hear deceptive reports about unemployment leveling off.
On top of this, the Bureau of Labor Statistics recently discovered that 824,000 job losses were never accounted for due to a "modeling error" in their data. Even in their initial January data there appears to be a huge understating, with the newest report saying the economy lost 20,000 jobs. TrimTabs employment analysis, which has consistently provided more accurate data, "estimated that the U.S. economy shed 104,000 jobs in January."
When you factor in all these uncounted workers -- "involuntary part-time" and "discouraged workers" -- the unemployment rate rises from 9.7 percent to over 20 percent. In total, we now have over 30 million U.S. citizens who are unemployed or underemployed. The rarely cited "employment-participation" rate, which reveals the percentage of the population that is currently in the workforce, has now fallen to 64 percent.
Even based on the "official" unemployment rate, just to get back to the unemployment level of 4.6 percent that we had in 2007, we need to create over 10 million new jobs, and most every serious economist will tell you that these jobs are not coming back. In fact, we are still consistently shedding jobs, on just one day, January 27, several companies announced new cuts of more than 60,000 jobs.
Due to the length of this crisis already, millions of Americans are reaching a point where the unemployment benefits they have been living on are coming to an end. More workers have already been out of work longer than at any point since statistics have been recorded, with over six million now unemployed for over six months. A record 20 million Americans qualified for unemployment insurance benefits last year, causing 27 states to run out of funds, with seven more also expected to go into the red within the next few months. In total, 40 state programs are expected to go broke.
Most economists believe the unemployment rate will remain high for the foreseeable future. What will happen when we have millions of laid-off workers without any unemployment benefits to save them?
Working More for Less
The millions struggling to find work are just part of the story. Due to the fact that we now have a record high six people for every one job opening, companies have been able to further increase the workload on their remaining employees. They have been able to increase the amount of hours Americans are working, reduce wages and drastically cut back on benefits. Even though Americans were already the most productive workers in the world before the economic crisis, in the third quarter of 2009, average worker productivity increased by an annualized rate of 9.5 percent, at the same time unit labor cost decreased by 5.2 percent. This has led to record profits for many companies. Of the 220 companies in the S&P 500 who have reported fourth-quarter results thus far, 78 percent of them had "better-than-expected profits" with earnings 17 percent above expectations, "the highest for any quarter since Thomson Reuters began tracking data."
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the national median wage was only $32,390 per year in 2008, and median household income fell by 3.6 percent while the unemployment rate was 5.8 percent. With the unemployment rate now at 10 percent, median income has been falling at a 5 percent rate and is expected to continue its decline. Not surprisingly, Americans' job satisfaction level is now at an all-time low.
There are also a growing number of employed people who, despite having a job, are still living in poverty. There are at least 15 million workers who now fall into this rapidly growing category. $32,390 a year is not going to get you far in today's economy, and half of the country is making less than that. This is why many Americans are now forced to work two jobs to provide for their family to hopefully make ends meet.
A Crime Against Humanity
The mainstream news media will numb us to this horrifying reality by endlessly talking about the latest numbers, but they never piece them together to show you the whole devastating picture, and they rarely show you all the immense individual suffering behind them. This is how they "normalize the unthinkable" and make us become passive in the face of such a high causality count.
Behind each of these numbers, is a tremendous amount of misery; the physical toll is only outdone by the severe psychological toll. Anyone who has had to put off medical care, or who couldn't get medical care for one of their family members due to financial circumstances, can tell you about the psychological toll that is on top of the physical suffering. Anyone who has felt the stress of wondering how they were going to get their child's next meal or their own, or the stress of not knowing how they are going to pay the mortgage, rent, electricity or heat bill, let alone the car payment, gas, phone, cable or Internet bill.
There are now well over 150 million Americans who feel stress over these things on a consistent basis. Over 60 percent of Americans now live paycheck to paycheck.
These are all basic things every person should be able to easily afford in a technologically advanced society such as ours. The reason we struggle with these things is because the Economic Elite have robbed us all. This amount of suffering in the United States of America is literally a crime against humanity.
This is Part I of David DeGraw's report, "The Economic Elite vs. People of the USA. " AlterNet will run Part II in the coming days.
Read more of David DeGraw's work on Amped Status.
© 2010 Amped Status All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/145667/
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Tuesday, February 09, 2010
The Democrats, the Deficit, and Social Security by Shamus Cooke, February 9, 2010
The Democrats, the Deficit, and Social Security by Shamus Cooke, February 9, 2010
It’s official: the Democrats are coming after Social Security and Medicare. How refreshing that all the backroom scheming and political conspiring is finally out in the open. Before, the corporate elite had been having this conversation in private, via right-wing think tanks and business journals. Now, mainstream media is promoting these ideas, including the Democrat’s media mouthpiece — The New York Times.
In a three-page editorial, entitled The Truth about the Deficit, The New York Times gives its solution to the country’s debt problems. The main idea is summed up here:
To truly tame deficits will require serious health care reform [Obama’s plan slashes Medicare], the sooner the better. Other aspects of the long-term fiscal problem —raising taxes and retooling [reducing] Social Security — must take place in earnest as the economy recovers.
(February 7, 2010).
Later the article is clearer: “And then there is Social Security. What is needed is a combination of benefit cuts and tax increases that preserve the program’s essential nature.” Of course, those surviving on Social Security already live in poverty and cannot afford “benefit cuts.” Also, to make a dent in the deficit, benefit cuts to Social Security will have to be quite substantial, to the point where the program’s “essential nature” will be destroyed.
The New York Times acknowledges that such a course of action will be completely undemocratic and unpopular, but that politicians “must gather the political will to do what must be done…”
How can politicians destroy these cherished social programs in the face of such popular resistance? By trickery, of course. And this is exactly what Obama has proposed with his “bi-partisan deficit-reduction commission.” This idea puts Democrats and Republicans together to create a plan to destroy social programs. This way both parties share the blame, so that no one is to blame. The New York Times reveals Obama’s hidden motives:
The deficit commission that Mr. Obama intends to establish could be helpful in breaking this logjam [resistance to cutting social security], by calling for necessary changes that politicians would be loath to broach without political cover.
Labor unions and community groups also understand Obama’s treacherous motives. Dozens of them — including the AFL-CIO and Change to Win — signed a statement condemning the goals behind Obama’s “deficit commission.” The statement included some politically savvy points, including the following:
the proposed budget commission — which will be viewed as a way to actually cut Medicare benefits, while insulating lawmakers from political fallout — could confuse people and undermine the reform effort. And an American public that only recently rejected privatization of Social Security will undoubtedly be suspicious of a process that shuts them out of all decisions regarding the future of a retirement system that's served them well in the current financial crisis.
The statement concludes: “We urge you to act decisively to prevent the creation of such an extraordinary and undemocratic budget commission.” (Huffington Post, January 20, 2010).
However, it is not enough for only the leaders of unions and community groups to pressure Obama over this issue, especially when Obama has made it clear that he prefers the advice of Wall Street CEO’s. Unions and progressive groups must educate and mobilize their base to confront both the Democrats and Republicans over the protection of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.
None of the major unions who signed the anti-commission statement have information about this plot on their websites; none are organizing their members to confront this plan — a plan that the entire political establishment is in agreement with. Nor are unions seriously proposing other ideas to fix the deficit, and the fixes are obvious.
The military budget must be gutted. Obama plans to spend over $700 billion in 2011 for the military — both Democrats and Republicans are fine with this. Most Americans are not.
More importantly, taxes on the rich need to be dramatically increased. The nation’s tax structure changed drastically under Reagan and the two Bushes, with taxes on the wealthiest Americans dropping from 70 percent to the present day 35 percent. Under Eisenhower, the richest Americans paid 90 percent of their income towards taxes. The loss in revenue that resulted from these giant tax reductions is one of the major contributors to the current deficit. It must be reversed in order to save Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
This is the solution that working-class Americans would prefer, rather than have their Medicare, Social Security, and public education destroyed. It is up to the union movement and community groups to unite and mobilize their members and all working people to demand this as a solution to the deficit and Great Recession.
Without a massive mobilization with rank and file participation, the corporate elite will continue to have their way unchallenged, with more bank bailouts and more war. A coalition of progressive groups with clear demands to address the recession will have the backing of the majority of Americans, while being resisted adamantly by both Democrats and Republicans.
It’s official: the Democrats are coming after Social Security and Medicare. How refreshing that all the backroom scheming and political conspiring is finally out in the open. Before, the corporate elite had been having this conversation in private, via right-wing think tanks and business journals. Now, mainstream media is promoting these ideas, including the Democrat’s media mouthpiece — The New York Times.
In a three-page editorial, entitled The Truth about the Deficit, The New York Times gives its solution to the country’s debt problems. The main idea is summed up here:
To truly tame deficits will require serious health care reform [Obama’s plan slashes Medicare], the sooner the better. Other aspects of the long-term fiscal problem —raising taxes and retooling [reducing] Social Security — must take place in earnest as the economy recovers.
(February 7, 2010).
Later the article is clearer: “And then there is Social Security. What is needed is a combination of benefit cuts and tax increases that preserve the program’s essential nature.” Of course, those surviving on Social Security already live in poverty and cannot afford “benefit cuts.” Also, to make a dent in the deficit, benefit cuts to Social Security will have to be quite substantial, to the point where the program’s “essential nature” will be destroyed.
The New York Times acknowledges that such a course of action will be completely undemocratic and unpopular, but that politicians “must gather the political will to do what must be done…”
How can politicians destroy these cherished social programs in the face of such popular resistance? By trickery, of course. And this is exactly what Obama has proposed with his “bi-partisan deficit-reduction commission.” This idea puts Democrats and Republicans together to create a plan to destroy social programs. This way both parties share the blame, so that no one is to blame. The New York Times reveals Obama’s hidden motives:
The deficit commission that Mr. Obama intends to establish could be helpful in breaking this logjam [resistance to cutting social security], by calling for necessary changes that politicians would be loath to broach without political cover.
Labor unions and community groups also understand Obama’s treacherous motives. Dozens of them — including the AFL-CIO and Change to Win — signed a statement condemning the goals behind Obama’s “deficit commission.” The statement included some politically savvy points, including the following:
the proposed budget commission — which will be viewed as a way to actually cut Medicare benefits, while insulating lawmakers from political fallout — could confuse people and undermine the reform effort. And an American public that only recently rejected privatization of Social Security will undoubtedly be suspicious of a process that shuts them out of all decisions regarding the future of a retirement system that's served them well in the current financial crisis.
The statement concludes: “We urge you to act decisively to prevent the creation of such an extraordinary and undemocratic budget commission.” (Huffington Post, January 20, 2010).
However, it is not enough for only the leaders of unions and community groups to pressure Obama over this issue, especially when Obama has made it clear that he prefers the advice of Wall Street CEO’s. Unions and progressive groups must educate and mobilize their base to confront both the Democrats and Republicans over the protection of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.
None of the major unions who signed the anti-commission statement have information about this plot on their websites; none are organizing their members to confront this plan — a plan that the entire political establishment is in agreement with. Nor are unions seriously proposing other ideas to fix the deficit, and the fixes are obvious.
The military budget must be gutted. Obama plans to spend over $700 billion in 2011 for the military — both Democrats and Republicans are fine with this. Most Americans are not.
More importantly, taxes on the rich need to be dramatically increased. The nation’s tax structure changed drastically under Reagan and the two Bushes, with taxes on the wealthiest Americans dropping from 70 percent to the present day 35 percent. Under Eisenhower, the richest Americans paid 90 percent of their income towards taxes. The loss in revenue that resulted from these giant tax reductions is one of the major contributors to the current deficit. It must be reversed in order to save Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
This is the solution that working-class Americans would prefer, rather than have their Medicare, Social Security, and public education destroyed. It is up to the union movement and community groups to unite and mobilize their members and all working people to demand this as a solution to the deficit and Great Recession.
Without a massive mobilization with rank and file participation, the corporate elite will continue to have their way unchallenged, with more bank bailouts and more war. A coalition of progressive groups with clear demands to address the recession will have the backing of the majority of Americans, while being resisted adamantly by both Democrats and Republicans.
Sunday, February 07, 2010
Friday, February 05, 2010
Hilda Bell Roberts, anti-fascist
Hilda Bell Roberts, anti-fascist
Hilda Bell Roberts, born in 1915 and raised in Philadelphia of immigrant parents, a lifelong progressive activist and a volunteer nurse in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the 1936-1939 Spanish Civil War fighting against fascist dictator Francisco Franco, passed away in the San Francisco Bay Area last Sept. 23. On Jan. 29, in her honor the Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists held a special showing of the Academy Award-nominated documentary film, “Forever Activists: Stories from the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.”
Following the film there was a special advance showing of a portion of a 1986 interview with Hilda from the Abraham Lincoln Brigade archives. Hilda, who lived in Berkeley, has already been greatly missed at local progressive rallies and demonstrations, which she had continued to participate in until the very last few months of her life, despite suffering from a very rare form of blood cancer that affected her mobility and ability to remember but against which she waged a courageous struggle.
Hilda Bell Roberts, ¡Presente!
— Report and photo by Joan Marquardt
Hilda Bell Roberts, born in 1915 and raised in Philadelphia of immigrant parents, a lifelong progressive activist and a volunteer nurse in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the 1936-1939 Spanish Civil War fighting against fascist dictator Francisco Franco, passed away in the San Francisco Bay Area last Sept. 23. On Jan. 29, in her honor the Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists held a special showing of the Academy Award-nominated documentary film, “Forever Activists: Stories from the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.”
Following the film there was a special advance showing of a portion of a 1986 interview with Hilda from the Abraham Lincoln Brigade archives. Hilda, who lived in Berkeley, has already been greatly missed at local progressive rallies and demonstrations, which she had continued to participate in until the very last few months of her life, despite suffering from a very rare form of blood cancer that affected her mobility and ability to remember but against which she waged a courageous struggle.
Hilda Bell Roberts, ¡Presente!
— Report and photo by Joan Marquardt
Thursday, February 04, 2010
The Corporate Takeover of U.S. Democracy : Information Clearing House - ICH
The Corporate Takeover of U.S. Democracy : Information Clearing House - ICH
The Corporate Takeover of U.S. Democracy
By Noam Chomsky
February 03, 2010 "In These Times" -- Jan. 21, 2010, will go down as a dark day in the history of U.S. democracy, and its decline.
On that day the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the government may not ban corporations from political spending on elections—a decision that profoundly affects government policy, both domestic and international.
The decision heralds even further corporate takeover of the U.S. political system.
To the editors of The New York Times, the ruling “strikes at the heart of democracy” by having “paved the way for corporations to use their vast treasuries to overwhelm elections and intimidate elected officials into doing their bidding.”
The court was split, 5-4, with the four reactionary judges (misleadingly called “conservative”) joined by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. selected a case that could easily have been settled on narrow grounds and maneuvered the court into using it to push through a far-reaching decision that overturns a century of precedents restricting corporate contributions to federal campaigns.
Now corporate managers can in effect buy elections directly, bypassing more complex indirect means. It is well-known that corporate contributions, sometimes packaged in complex ways, can tip the balance in elections, hence driving policy. The court has just handed much more power to the small sector of the population that dominates the economy.
Political economist Thomas Ferguson’s “investment theory of politics” is a very successful predictor of government policy over a long period. The theory interprets elections as occasions on which segments of private sector power coalesce to invest to control the state.
The Jan. 21 decision only reinforces the means to undermine functioning democracy.
The background is enlightening. In his dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens acknowledged that “we have long since held that corporations are covered by the First Amendment”—the constitutional guarantee of free speech, which would include support for political candidates.
In the early 20th century, legal theorists and courts implemented the court’s 1886 decision that corporations—these “collectivist legal entities”—have the same rights as persons of flesh and blood.
This attack on classical liberalism was sharply condemned by the vanishing breed of conservatives. Christopher G. Tiedeman described the principle as “a menace to the liberty of the individual, and to the stability of the American states as popular governments.”
Morton Horwitz writes in his standard legal history that the concept of corporate personhood evolved alongside the shift of power from shareholders to managers, and finally to the doctrine that “the powers of the board of directors “are identical with the powers of the corporation.” In later years, corporate rights were expanded far beyond those of persons, notably by the mislabeled “free trade agreements.” Under these agreements, for example, if General Motors establishes a plant in Mexico, it can demand to be treated just like a Mexican business (“national treatment”)—quite unlike a Mexican of flesh and blood who might seek “national treatment” in New York, or even minimal human rights.
A century ago, Woodrow Wilson, then an academic, described an America in which “comparatively small groups of men,” corporate managers, “wield a power and control over the wealth and the business operations of the country,” becoming “rivals of the government itself.”
In reality, these “small groups” increasingly have become government’s masters. The Roberts court gives them even greater scope.
The Jan. 21 decision came three days after another victory for wealth and power: the election of Republican candidate Scott Brown to replace the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, the “liberal lion” of Massachusetts. Brown’s election was depicted as a “populist upsurge” against the liberal elitists who run the government.
The voting data reveal a rather different story.
High turnouts in the wealthy suburbs, and low ones in largely Democratic urban areas, helped elect Brown. “Fifty-five percent of Republican voters said they were `very interested’ in the election,” The Wall St. Journal/NBC poll reported, “compared with 38 percent of Democrats.”
So the results were indeed an uprising against President Obama’s policies: For the wealthy, he was not doing enough to enrich them further, while for the poorer sectors, he was doing too much to achieve that end.
The popular anger is quite understandable, given that the banks are thriving, thanks to bailouts, while unemployment has risen to 10 percent.
In manufacturing, one in six is out of work—unemployment at the level of the Great Depression. With the increasing financialization of the economy and the hollowing out of productive industry, prospects are bleak for recovering the kinds of jobs that were lost.
Brown presented himself as the 41st vote against healthcare—that is, the vote that could undermine majority rule in the U.S. Senate.
It is true that Obama’s healthcare program was a factor in the Massachusetts election. The headlines are correct when they report that the public is turning against the program.
The poll figures explain why: The bill does not go far enough. The Wall St. Journal/NBC poll found that a majority of voters disapprove of the handling of healthcare both by the Republicans and by Obama.
These figures align with recent nationwide polls. The public option was favored by 56 percent of those polled, and the Medicare buy-in at age 55 by 64 percent; both programs were abandoned.
Eighty-five percent believe that the government should have the right to negotiate drug prices, as in other countries; Obama guaranteed Big Pharma that he would not pursue that option.
Large majorities favor cost-cutting, which makes good sense: U.S. per capita costs for healthcare are about twice those of other industrial countries, and health outcomes are at the low end.
But cost-cutting cannot be seriously undertaken when largesse is showered on the drug companies, and healthcare is in the hands of virtually unregulated private insurers—a costly system peculiar to the U.S.
The Jan. 21 decision raises significant new barriers to overcoming the serious crisis of healthcare, or to addressing such critical issues as the looming environmental and energy crises. The gap between public opinion and public policy looms larger. And the damage to American democracy can hardly be overestimated.
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor & Professor of Linguistics (Emeritus) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the author of dozens of books on U.S. foreign policy. He writes a monthly column for The New York Times News Service/Syndicate.
Click on "comments" below to read or post comments
The Corporate Takeover of U.S. Democracy
By Noam Chomsky
February 03, 2010 "In These Times" -- Jan. 21, 2010, will go down as a dark day in the history of U.S. democracy, and its decline.
On that day the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the government may not ban corporations from political spending on elections—a decision that profoundly affects government policy, both domestic and international.
The decision heralds even further corporate takeover of the U.S. political system.
To the editors of The New York Times, the ruling “strikes at the heart of democracy” by having “paved the way for corporations to use their vast treasuries to overwhelm elections and intimidate elected officials into doing their bidding.”
The court was split, 5-4, with the four reactionary judges (misleadingly called “conservative”) joined by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. selected a case that could easily have been settled on narrow grounds and maneuvered the court into using it to push through a far-reaching decision that overturns a century of precedents restricting corporate contributions to federal campaigns.
Now corporate managers can in effect buy elections directly, bypassing more complex indirect means. It is well-known that corporate contributions, sometimes packaged in complex ways, can tip the balance in elections, hence driving policy. The court has just handed much more power to the small sector of the population that dominates the economy.
Political economist Thomas Ferguson’s “investment theory of politics” is a very successful predictor of government policy over a long period. The theory interprets elections as occasions on which segments of private sector power coalesce to invest to control the state.
The Jan. 21 decision only reinforces the means to undermine functioning democracy.
The background is enlightening. In his dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens acknowledged that “we have long since held that corporations are covered by the First Amendment”—the constitutional guarantee of free speech, which would include support for political candidates.
In the early 20th century, legal theorists and courts implemented the court’s 1886 decision that corporations—these “collectivist legal entities”—have the same rights as persons of flesh and blood.
This attack on classical liberalism was sharply condemned by the vanishing breed of conservatives. Christopher G. Tiedeman described the principle as “a menace to the liberty of the individual, and to the stability of the American states as popular governments.”
Morton Horwitz writes in his standard legal history that the concept of corporate personhood evolved alongside the shift of power from shareholders to managers, and finally to the doctrine that “the powers of the board of directors “are identical with the powers of the corporation.” In later years, corporate rights were expanded far beyond those of persons, notably by the mislabeled “free trade agreements.” Under these agreements, for example, if General Motors establishes a plant in Mexico, it can demand to be treated just like a Mexican business (“national treatment”)—quite unlike a Mexican of flesh and blood who might seek “national treatment” in New York, or even minimal human rights.
A century ago, Woodrow Wilson, then an academic, described an America in which “comparatively small groups of men,” corporate managers, “wield a power and control over the wealth and the business operations of the country,” becoming “rivals of the government itself.”
In reality, these “small groups” increasingly have become government’s masters. The Roberts court gives them even greater scope.
The Jan. 21 decision came three days after another victory for wealth and power: the election of Republican candidate Scott Brown to replace the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, the “liberal lion” of Massachusetts. Brown’s election was depicted as a “populist upsurge” against the liberal elitists who run the government.
The voting data reveal a rather different story.
High turnouts in the wealthy suburbs, and low ones in largely Democratic urban areas, helped elect Brown. “Fifty-five percent of Republican voters said they were `very interested’ in the election,” The Wall St. Journal/NBC poll reported, “compared with 38 percent of Democrats.”
So the results were indeed an uprising against President Obama’s policies: For the wealthy, he was not doing enough to enrich them further, while for the poorer sectors, he was doing too much to achieve that end.
The popular anger is quite understandable, given that the banks are thriving, thanks to bailouts, while unemployment has risen to 10 percent.
In manufacturing, one in six is out of work—unemployment at the level of the Great Depression. With the increasing financialization of the economy and the hollowing out of productive industry, prospects are bleak for recovering the kinds of jobs that were lost.
Brown presented himself as the 41st vote against healthcare—that is, the vote that could undermine majority rule in the U.S. Senate.
It is true that Obama’s healthcare program was a factor in the Massachusetts election. The headlines are correct when they report that the public is turning against the program.
The poll figures explain why: The bill does not go far enough. The Wall St. Journal/NBC poll found that a majority of voters disapprove of the handling of healthcare both by the Republicans and by Obama.
These figures align with recent nationwide polls. The public option was favored by 56 percent of those polled, and the Medicare buy-in at age 55 by 64 percent; both programs were abandoned.
Eighty-five percent believe that the government should have the right to negotiate drug prices, as in other countries; Obama guaranteed Big Pharma that he would not pursue that option.
Large majorities favor cost-cutting, which makes good sense: U.S. per capita costs for healthcare are about twice those of other industrial countries, and health outcomes are at the low end.
But cost-cutting cannot be seriously undertaken when largesse is showered on the drug companies, and healthcare is in the hands of virtually unregulated private insurers—a costly system peculiar to the U.S.
The Jan. 21 decision raises significant new barriers to overcoming the serious crisis of healthcare, or to addressing such critical issues as the looming environmental and energy crises. The gap between public opinion and public policy looms larger. And the damage to American democracy can hardly be overestimated.
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor & Professor of Linguistics (Emeritus) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the author of dozens of books on U.S. foreign policy. He writes a monthly column for The New York Times News Service/Syndicate.
Click on "comments" below to read or post comments
Tuesday, February 02, 2010
Reagan Brought Back From Grave : Information Clearing House - ICH
Reagan Brought Back From Grave : Information Clearing House - ICH
Reagan Brought Back From Grave
By David Sirota
January 23, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- "After months of struggling to find their footing, it looks like the GOP has finally found an effective spokesman:
Republican leaders have unveiled the reanimated corpse of Ronald Reagan, (and) the undead former president has quickly emerged as the new face of the Republican Party." - The Onion.
This line from a recent satire perfectly captures the moment's political zeitgeist - except for one detail: Republicans aren't responsible for the revival of Reaganism. Democrats are.
That is the moral of Massachusetts' U.S. Senate election this week.
In a state where Democrats outnumber the GOP by a three-to-one margin, little-known Republican Scott Brown defeated Democratic Attorney General Martha Coakley with an ancient Reaganesque message demonizing the government and taxes.
Why did this tired old Republican tactic suddenly work? Because Reagan's vote-eating cadaver is now stalking the land thanks to Democrats' odious new worldview.
In 2009, Democrats made clear that their idea of government is radically different from the one embedded in their legacy and campaign promises. They unleashed what The Nation's Chris Hayes calls "corporatism" - an agenda that fuses public and private sectors, replacing Rooseveltian regulations and LBJ-esque social safety nets with taxpayer-funded bribes of rapacious business interests.
In Democratic corporatism, "government" is not what it used to be - it is not tough financial rules or public programs like Medicare.
Instead, "government" now means giving public dollars to private banking, insurance and drug firms, then hoping (but not mandating) that such largesse compels those companies to change.
This public-private collusion, it must be noted, is not limited to one of the two parties - in today's money-dominated politics, they both champion it when in power.
The difference is that unlike business-affiliated Republicans, Democrats in 2008 explicitly pledged to fight such state-sponsored larceny, and America sees their subsequent betrayal as an unseemly attempt to feign concern for voters while enriching the party's corporate donors.
The problem, of course, is that those are mutually exclusive constituencies. You cannot fix the financial system, punish Wall Street thieves and reform health care as the electorate wants while also preserving the same financial system, rewarding Wall Street thieves and strengthening the health-care status quo, as wealthy campaign benefactors demand.
In the 1980s, the living, breathing Reagan faced at least some obstacles in attacking a government of beloved New Deal and Great Society programs. Presently, though, Reagan's undead carcass (whether rendered as Brown or any other Republican opportunist) is finding easier success because the moans that "government is the problem" vilify a government of rightly despised corporatism. Indeed, it's no surprise that voters - including self-described liberals - are sympathizing with anti-Democrat, anti-tax and anti-government arguments at a time when Democrats are funneling tax dollars into executive bonuses and equating government with hated industries.
Incredibly, as clumsy as the Reagan zombie still is (and as hypocritical as formerly corporatist Republicans are), Democrats' reaction to the onslaught has been positively inept. Only in the last week, when facing the Senate election loss, did the White House finally back a populist-sounding levy on the biggest banks - but that tiny proposal looked like desperate pandering.
As Massachusetts proves, Obama and his party will need to muster much more than hollow gestures to stop the election-hungry corpse they needlessly resurrected.
David Sirota is a fellow at the Campaign for America's Future and a board member of the Progressive States Network — both nonpartisan organizations. His blog is at www.credoaction.com/sirota.
Reagan Brought Back From Grave
By David Sirota
January 23, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- "After months of struggling to find their footing, it looks like the GOP has finally found an effective spokesman:
Republican leaders have unveiled the reanimated corpse of Ronald Reagan, (and) the undead former president has quickly emerged as the new face of the Republican Party." - The Onion.
This line from a recent satire perfectly captures the moment's political zeitgeist - except for one detail: Republicans aren't responsible for the revival of Reaganism. Democrats are.
That is the moral of Massachusetts' U.S. Senate election this week.
In a state where Democrats outnumber the GOP by a three-to-one margin, little-known Republican Scott Brown defeated Democratic Attorney General Martha Coakley with an ancient Reaganesque message demonizing the government and taxes.
Why did this tired old Republican tactic suddenly work? Because Reagan's vote-eating cadaver is now stalking the land thanks to Democrats' odious new worldview.
In 2009, Democrats made clear that their idea of government is radically different from the one embedded in their legacy and campaign promises. They unleashed what The Nation's Chris Hayes calls "corporatism" - an agenda that fuses public and private sectors, replacing Rooseveltian regulations and LBJ-esque social safety nets with taxpayer-funded bribes of rapacious business interests.
In Democratic corporatism, "government" is not what it used to be - it is not tough financial rules or public programs like Medicare.
Instead, "government" now means giving public dollars to private banking, insurance and drug firms, then hoping (but not mandating) that such largesse compels those companies to change.
This public-private collusion, it must be noted, is not limited to one of the two parties - in today's money-dominated politics, they both champion it when in power.
The difference is that unlike business-affiliated Republicans, Democrats in 2008 explicitly pledged to fight such state-sponsored larceny, and America sees their subsequent betrayal as an unseemly attempt to feign concern for voters while enriching the party's corporate donors.
The problem, of course, is that those are mutually exclusive constituencies. You cannot fix the financial system, punish Wall Street thieves and reform health care as the electorate wants while also preserving the same financial system, rewarding Wall Street thieves and strengthening the health-care status quo, as wealthy campaign benefactors demand.
In the 1980s, the living, breathing Reagan faced at least some obstacles in attacking a government of beloved New Deal and Great Society programs. Presently, though, Reagan's undead carcass (whether rendered as Brown or any other Republican opportunist) is finding easier success because the moans that "government is the problem" vilify a government of rightly despised corporatism. Indeed, it's no surprise that voters - including self-described liberals - are sympathizing with anti-Democrat, anti-tax and anti-government arguments at a time when Democrats are funneling tax dollars into executive bonuses and equating government with hated industries.
Incredibly, as clumsy as the Reagan zombie still is (and as hypocritical as formerly corporatist Republicans are), Democrats' reaction to the onslaught has been positively inept. Only in the last week, when facing the Senate election loss, did the White House finally back a populist-sounding levy on the biggest banks - but that tiny proposal looked like desperate pandering.
As Massachusetts proves, Obama and his party will need to muster much more than hollow gestures to stop the election-hungry corpse they needlessly resurrected.
David Sirota is a fellow at the Campaign for America's Future and a board member of the Progressive States Network — both nonpartisan organizations. His blog is at www.credoaction.com/sirota.
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