Spending Cuts Alluring


On March 11, the day of President Obama's last press conference (transcript here), Robert Reich posted (on his own site, here cross-posted on The Huffington Post) "Why Obama Isn't Fighting the Budget Battle." It turns, as you would expect, on presidential politics:

Shortly after the Democrats' "shellacking" last November, I phoned a friend in the White House who had served in the Clinton administration. "It's 1994 all over again," he said. "Now we move to the center."

As Reich points out, President Clinton won re-election in 1996 less because of a pivot to the center than from recovery of the economy. Obama, however, is not likely to be as lucky. Profits of American corporations are up but primarily from sales of their foreign operations. Consumer spending, except among the wealthy, remains very sluggish. Sales are insufficient to convince businesses to resume hiring and productivity is soaring, enabling the private sector to maintain or increase profits with fewer employees. With interest rates near record lows, there is little margin to increase the money supply to spur growth. Consequently, Reich recognizes

Obama's challenge in 2012 has nothing to do with Bill Clinton's in 1996. He must fight the Republican plans to cut the budget deficit this year and next, and explain to the public why he's doing so. And he must convince Americans that public spending during the next few years is necessary to get the economy moving, reduce the long-term debt as a portion of the total economy, and get jobs back.

Unfortunately, it appears that President Obama doesn't understand this (though Senator Obama probably would have). One cannot be certain, given Obama's understandable concern with the political impact of policy and his obsession with being, as Joe Romm, puts it, the "converser in chief," always ready for a conversation with his antagonists. Consider, though, this President's comments during the aforementioned press conference:

I think one of the messages that the American people have clearly sent is get serious about living within our means and managing our budget in a responsible way, and stop with the political bickering. And if we have that view in mind, then I think that not only can we get this short-term issue resolved, but I think we can actually solve the long-term budget issues as well.

The GOP, trying to eliminate the niggling subsidies for NPR/Corporation for Public Broaddcasting and family planning/Planned Parenthood, wants to cut primarily for ideological reasons. Not so President Obama, who speaks of "winning the future" and asserted during the press conference "we’re going to make sure that we hold the line when it comes to some critical programs that are either going to help us out-educate, out-innovate, or out-build other countries."

If more than rhetorical flourish, that suggests the President's policies are as misguided as his ("out-") grammar. Notwithstanding the Republican/Obama fetish with spending, the American people are still anxious about job loss, there being five or more job seekers for every available job (graph below, from Economic Policy Institute). Cutting spending not only will not create jobs or spur economic growth, it is a political loser. And if, in the unlikely event inflation takes hold with unemployment no less than 8%, the President who failed to stand for anything but "winning the future" will be riding out that future in Hawaii or Illinois.

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Overwrought Reaction


The online edition, pittsburghlive.com, of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review asks rhetorically in an editorial on Friday:

On Wednesday, Mr. Obama appeared on ESPN to announce his picks for the NCAA basketball tournament.

Earlier in the week, he gave "exclusive" interviews to TV stations from around the country -- including Pittsburgh's KDKA -- on "education reform." (KDKA's story catapulted pro forma local TV video stenography to news lows.)

Saturday last, when not giving his weekly radio address on the critically important issue of Women's History Month, Obama was playing golf -- reported to be the 61st round of his presidency -- joking that it was not "playing" at all but an "investment."

That was fast on the heels of his riveting summit on "bullying."

Can you imagine how the mainstream media would have reacted to such disconnected behavior had it been a Republican president?

Actually, we don't have to imagine how the mainstream media would have reacted to a similar response by a Repub president. Nor do we have to go back much in time. Researchers Allan Wood and Paul Thompson remind us

At approximately 8:48 a.m. on the morning of September 11, 2001, the first pictures of the burning World Trade Center were broadcast on live television. The news anchors, reporters, and viewers had little idea what had happened in lower Manhattan, but there were some people who did know. By that time, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), the National Military Command Center, the Pentagon, the White House, the Secret Service, and Canada’s Strategic Command all knew that three commercial airplanes had been hijacked. They knew that one plane had been flown deliberately into the World Trade Center’s North Tower; a second plane was wildly off course and also heading toward Manhattan; and a third plane had abruptly turned around over Ohio and was flying back toward Washington, DC.

So why, at 9:03 a.m.—fifteen minutes after it was clear the United States was under terrorist attack—did President Bush sit down with a classroom of second-graders and begin a 20-minute pre-planned photo op? No one knows the answer to that question. In fact, no one has even asked Bush about it.

No one asked President Bush why it was more important for him to be photographed with schoolchildren than to act upon the threat to the nation from the most deadly terrorist attack in world history. Nor- until popular support for the Iraq war declined significantly- were many questions asked about the White House's lackadaisical response to this portion of the August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing:

Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate bin Laden since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US. Bin Laden implied in U.S. television interviews in 1997 and 1998 that his followers would follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and "bring the fighting to America.

Nor have many questions ever been asked about the Administration's seeming lack of concern prior to 9/11/01 toward the terrorist threat, which included the effort of the Attorney General on 9/10/01 "to slash funding from counterterrorism and grants and other homeland defense programs."

It is probably of little concern to the millions- tens of millions?- of Americans in NCAA playoff pools that President Obama also is interested in the outcome of the tournament. The Trib-Review, if it were preferred to ask the tough questions to dwelling in trivia, might ponder the national obsession over athletics that inspires male politicians to point and say "hey, look, at me, I like sports, too." And while playing golf is indefensible (for anyone, at any time), it is a relatively harmless way for the President to ingratiate himself with a Wall Street crowd that helped bankroll his 2008 campaign but now is showering the opposing party with cash.

So, yes, we know how the mainstream media reacted to President Bush turning a blind eye to a national emergency- the terrorist peril before the September '01 attacks- and his inattention during a national emergency. This President has addressed, effectively or otherwise, the situations in Egypt, Libya, and Japan. If the mainstream media has viewed Mr. Obama's approach insufficiently critically, it is only part of a pattern which politically benefited his predecessor, enabling the latter's reelection and completion of two terms without threat of impeachment.

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Seeing Eye-T0-Eye On Social Security


The GOP has made it perfectly clear. And President Obama has made it clear, maybe.

On Tuesday, House Democrats offered to the short-term budget deal, which extended government operations for three weeks, an amendment which failed on a nearly exact party line vote. According to Jed Lewison, the text of the amendment:

SEC. 295. None of the funds made available by this Act may be used to develop or implement a system that cuts Social Security benefits, or that privatizes Social Security.

SEC. 296. None of the funds made available by this Act may be used to develop or implement a system that cuts Medicare benefits, eliminates guaranteed health coverage for seniors, or establishes a Medicare voucher plan that limits payments to beneficiaries in order to purchase health care in the private sector.

This was not a measure intended to block cuts to Social Security or medicare nor to reform either the entitlement program for the elderly. It merely offered House Republicans, advocates of a $61 billion cut to the budget, an opportunity to pledge they will not jack up the deficit in order to privatize Social Security or Medicare. And all but one passed on that opportunity.

If that didn't make the intent of the GOP clear, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan of Massachusetts cleared up any confusion when, responding on St. Patrick's Day to Senate Majority Leader Reid's assertion that cuts to Social Security should not be considered now, he admitted

I’m boggled. That just boggles my mind…I would argue, even though, it’s not really a driver of our debt, it’s not a significant part of our debt problems, it would build great confidence, fixing Social Security on a bipartisan basis, because it would tell not only the credit markets that Americans are getting their act together, it would buy us more time and space with them, it would show that our government’s not broken.

Gone- though probably temporarily- in the space of three days was any pretense by the GOP that cutting Social Security has anything to do with the deficit or the debt. It really is all about Wall Street and putting ever more distance between society's have-a-lots and the rest of us. Nevertheless, this thinking apparently puts the party in line with the guy at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, as Digby notes:

the audience Ryan was trying to reach with that statement has just a little bit more power than all the rest of us put together on this. His name is Barack Obama and he has long signaled that he really, really, really wants to make a deal (aka the Grand Bargain).

For now, though, The Hill reports,

Obama’s political team, led by David Axelrod, David Plouffe and Jim Messina, are urging the president to understand that backing benefit cuts could prove disastrous to his 2012 reelection hopes, sources say.

The political team is winning the argument so far, but internal debate rages at the White House as Republicans in Congress insist sweeping efforts to restore government finances must include Social Security reform.

But the policy guys are pushing hard against the elderly as

“Gene Sperling and Jason Furman and some of the Treasury people started with the posture that we’re the best people to reform Social Security — that was when the Democrats had a majority in both houses of Congress,” said a Democratic policy expert who has met Obama’s economic policy team over the past two years.

“The same people have continued to make that argument even as they’re now responding to conservatives who are stronger in the Congress,” the source, who strongly opposes benefits cuts, told The Hill.

The policy team knows its boss well, that he is aware that Social Security does not add to the deficit but is eager to please the crew in midtown Manhattan:

Obama’s economics team is telling the president that benefit cuts would be less draconian with Democrats controlling the White House. Cutting costs for the safety net would help bond markets and restrain future interest rates, they add.

This may be a marriage made in heaven, or hell- the President casting an eye on the bond markets and the GOP's point man on the budget talking about the credit markets. It may be a little hot to handle now, what with overwhelming majorities of Americans opposing cuts in Social Security benefits- not only privatization, the deal-killer for the President.

But the 2012 presidential election and a new congress are not far away. Whereas in 2007, 42% of the nation's wealth was held by its wealthiest 1% (chart below, from William Domhoff via DailyKos), the figure probably has grown by now. And it's never too late for a president aching to be transformative and a party patterning itself after Ayn Rand, Rush Limbaugh, and Gordon Gekko to get that number up to 60 or 65%.

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On Bill Maher, A Thumbs Up


M.J. Rosenberg is angry and annoyed. On last Friday's "Real Time with Bill Maher," the host interviewed Representative Keith Ellison (D-MN), the first Muslim member of the United States Congress, and the distinguished (really) leftist/progressive blogged

I can't wait for HBO to dump Bill Maher, which they would have done years ago if he directed his hate at African-Americans, gays, Jews, Latinos or pretty much any group other than Muslims.

Rosenberg observed Maher telling Ellison, who converted from Roman Catholicism to Islam at age 19, "I didn't even know you served time in prison" and "spewing one anti-Muslim canard after another."

Understandably, Rosenberg neglected to identify the repeated "anti-Muslim canards." The interview (video below) centered on Maher's contention that "there are other groups that pose a terrorist threat to the U.S.... I would say that the threat, potentially, from radicalized Muslims is a unique and greater threat."

Rosenberg, a supporter of Arab Palestinians, failed to say what part of Maher's reasoning he disagrees with. Certainly, the comedians' belief that "it takes only one" terrorist act from a radicalized Muslim to have a devastating affect on American society is a widespread, and probably majority, view in this nation. This contrasts, Maher asserts, with terrorism from the right, more common but more limited in scope. I think he is right- but that doesn't matter.

Maher may be right or he may be wrong about this and his view that the Koran is a hate-filled book taken too seriously by many Muslims. But that doesn't matter.

What does matter, however, is:

1) Maher's perspective is not only a popular one but legitimate- well within the bounds of reason, justified or not; and

2) Although obviously there is no constitutional, or otherwise legal, issue of free speech involved, a liberal/progressive should pause- and then pause some more- before urging the dismissal of an individual from his job, even in broadcasting, for expression of a belief he finds noxious.

We've been down this road before with Maher. Hosting "Politically Incorrect" on ABC, Maher responded to President Bush's characterization of the 9/11/01 terrorists as cowards by commenting "We have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That's cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it's not cowardly." After the firestorm of criticism, the program lost sponsors and not long after was terminated.

Maher never denied or doubted the evil of the terrorists, only their cowardice. Nevertheless, his career suffered because he had the temerity to express views which offended powerful interests. His dedication to free expression and voicing unpopular views is one which Rosenberg, cool to the one democracy in the Middle East, presumably would welcome. But apparently not.

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Taking From Us and Giving To The Rich


Over the past two-and-a-half weeks, the following joke has been making the rounds. Here it is taken from a site called "sexgenderbody," one of the 7,381,234 places it has recently appeared:

A CEO, a Tea Party member and a union member are sitting at a table. In the middle of the table is a plate with a dozen cookies. The CEO reaches over , takes 11 cookies, looks at the Tea Partier, and says, “Look out for that guy, he wants a piece of your cookie."

For Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (R-Koch Brothers), however, that's just the way the cookie crumbles or perhaps the way the Founding Fathers intended it. In an opinion piece that stained the pages of The Washington Post, the Governor remarked

My brother is a banquet manager and occasional bartender at a hotel. He pays nearly $800 a month for his family’s health insurance and can put away only a little bit toward his 401(k). He would love the plan I’m offering to public employees.

It would never occur to Walker- or perhaps he'd not like to remind you- that perhaps his brother the banquet manager and occasional bartender should get a defined benefits pension plan or maybe the option to enjoy a health plan offered as a public option. No, for Walker it's a matter of pitting some middle class workers against middle class workers. What matters for the governor and his followers is not what one earns in salary or benefits but what one gets compared to other workers.

Walker is not alone in his contempt for workers. Karoli on Crooks and Liars reports a recent conversation about Wisconsin on GOP TV with pundit Kirsten Powers and Jay Townsend, the Republican defeated by Senator Chuck Schumer last November. The latter commented

I take away this. Number one, elections have consequences. Number two, unions will never have any trouble renting a riot, and number three, when you gore that pig and wound it, it can make a lot of noise, and that's the message I would take out of this.

But look, the bottom line here is employees in Wisconsin still have the right to collectively bargain. It doesn't take away their right to belong to a union. That's what's been lost in all this propaganda.

Pigs! Pigs, I tell you! They're all pigs! If the bottom 90% of the income scale gained only 36.3% of the nation's income growth from 1979 to 2007 and they are pigs, what would that make the top 1%, which captured 38.7% of income growth during the same period (chart from Ezra Klein, from Economic Policy Institute based on CBO data)?








It's critical to divert the gaze of Walker's undeserving public employees and Townsend's "pigs" from the top 1%. As usual, Rush Limbaugh well encapsulated the Repub war on the middle class when on February 10 he looked down his nose and sneered

You cannot have, as your standard operating procedure, the notion that you are going to transfer from earners to non-earners or from producers to non-producers and create wealth.

On his "new rules" segment (video, below, from Crooks and Liars) on Real Time, Bill Maher slammed ABC's Undercover Boss for peddling the idea that if only the wealthy boss spent a little time with his underlings, he (she) would understand. Except

Say 100 Americans get together and order a 100 slice pizza. The pizza arrives and the first guy takes 80 slices. And if someone suggests, why don't you just take 79 slices, that's socialism! I know, I know. I know, I know, it's just a TV show. But it does reinforce the stupid idea people have that rich people would love us and share with us if only they got to walk a mile in our cheap plastic shoes.

But they're the reason the shoe factory moved to China. We have this fantasy that our interests and the interests of the super rich are the same. Like somehow the rich will eventually get so full that they'll explode. And the candy will rain down on the rest of us.







The "producers" are a lot less like Limbaugh's fantasy than Maher's reality, in which "America's rich aren't giving you money; they're taking your money." And that's just the way the new wave of GOP governors- Scott Walker, John Kasich, Chris Christie, Nikki Haley, Terry Branstad, Rick Snyder, and others- likes it.

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Exploitation, Utah-Style


"Utah," a misguided member of the Washington Post editorial staff writes," has passed the nation's most liberal and most reality-based policy on illegal immigration. And the Republican governor is expected to sign it."

For that we are all to stand up and applaud. It is "a milestone," Les Hockstader opines, which began with

the "Utah Compact," a pithy declaration of reform principles drafted last fall by business leaders and conservative elites, who feared Utah would follow in Arizona's footsteps and risk losing tens of millions of dollars in tourism and convention business, as Arizona did. The compact helped swing public opinion in Utah away from the illegal-immigrant bashers who admired Arizona's law.

The effort, which an impressed Hockstader finds all the more "interesting" because it "is coming from unimpeachable conservatives," consists of a package of three laws, one a less controversial version of Arizona SB 1070, a second which, The New York Times reports

authorized the creation of a state guest worker program by 2013, and instructed the governor and the state attorney general to negotiate with federal authorities for a waiver to allow Utah employers to hire illegal immigrants.

State Attorney General Mark Shurtleff noted "it's a federal crime to employ an illegal alien. I don't know how you get a waiver for a federal crime. I'm going to try."

If the waiver is granted, it may open a whole new role for the federal government. Perhaps businesses in Utah, or another state, can apply for a waiver to pay workers less than the middle wage or to employ child laborers. The possibilities, truly, are endless. And what could be better than waiving application of a law by a "government of laws, and not of men?"

The third new immigration law aims to facilitates the transfer of laborers from Mexico to Utah through existing federal guest-worker programs.

Perspective comes from German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who in October explained

Germany's attempt to create a multicultural society has "failed, utterly failed."

Merkel, speaking October 16 at a meeting of her Christian Democratic party in the city of Potsdam, said decades of allowing people of different cultural backgrounds to live side by side without integrating into mainstream society has not worked for Germany.

"In Frankfurt on the Main, two out of three children under the age of five have an immigrant background,” Merkel said.

“We are a country which, at the beginning of the 1960s, actually brought guest workers to Germany. Now they live with us and we lied to ourselves for a while, saying that they won't stay and that they will have disappeared again one day. That's not the reality. This [multicultural] approach -- saying that we simply live side by side and are happy about each other -- this approach has failed, utterly failed."

Germany's failed guest worker program, evidently, invited laborers who were to "have disappeared again one day." Similarly, Hockstader indicates "Utah's guest-worker bill doesn't grant citizenship, of course."

Of course it doesn't- if it did, the labors would be more difficult to exploit and might actually integrate into society, enriching the American mosaic. It's easy, therefore, to understand corporate America's delight at the thought of an extensive network of temporary workers. But it's disconcerting that a portion of the left does not understand that such programs, which treat immigrants as disposable, second-class citizens, incorporate the seeds of the destruction of the very multiculturalism they purport to promote. Just ask Angela Merkel.

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Obama Does It Again


Oops. P.J. Crowley went a little too far.

The State Department spokesman has stepped down after he labeled as "ridiculous, counterproductive and stupid" the treatment in solitary confinement of Army Pfc. Bradley, who is suspected of imparting classified information to Wikileaks. He might have been spared the misfortune of being asked to resign if he had served under the same man who, as a presidential candidate criticizing the Bush administration's use of phone companies to help conduct its spying operations, had declared

We only know these crimes took place because insiders blew the whistle at great personal risk ... Government whistleblowers are part of a healthy democracy and must be protected from reprisal.

Unfortunately for Crowley, the President is one Barack Obama, hardly the same guy who in 2008 valued the support of individuals concerned about civil liberties. The fellow who is President, responding to a question from ABC's Jake Tapper about Manning, replied

With respect -- with respect to Private Manning, you know, I have actually asked the Pentagon whether or not the procedures that have been taken in terms of his confinement are appropriate and are meeting our basic standards. They assure me that they are. I can't go into details about some of their concerns, but some of this has to do with Private Manning's safety as well.

One of those dedicated to civil liberties is the lawyer and blogger Glenn Greenwald, who writes often, and impressively about the subject (less often, fortunately, about foreign policy). Greenwald notes

The inhumane treatment of Manning plainly has two principal effects: it intimidates future would-be whistleblowers into knowing that they, too, will be abused without recourse, and it will break him psychologically (as prolonged solitary confinement and degrading treatment inevitably do) to render him incapable of a defense and to ensure he provides whatever statements they want about WikiLeaks. Other than Obama's tolerance for the same detainee abuse against which he campaigned and his ongoing subservience to the military that he supposedly "commands," it is the way in which this Manning/Crowley behavior bolsters the regime of secrecy and the President's obsessive attempts to destroy whistleblowing that makes this episode so important and so telling.

Greenwald notes criticism of the President's Manning/Crowley policy from some of Obama's traditional supporters, such as Matt Yglesias, Andrew Sullivan Ezra Klein, Will Bunch, Daniel Ellsberg, and (UCLA professor) Mark Kleiman. Observing support from the far right (which cheered Bush 43 as he shred the U.S. Constitution in the name of counter-terrorism), Greenwald remarks "the news isn't all bad."

But in the world of Barack Obama and Emanuel/Daley, public outrage from supporters of the President is not a bug, it's a benefit. They believe, as does William Galston, that the road to re-election is through Independents and moving to the right, notwithstanding public support (as the chart from monkeycage.org indicates) for maintaining levels of Social Security and Medicare and most forms of spending, even at the risk, in most cases, of increasing the deficit.




















Galston, Matthews, and others who recommend the President move toward the center (presumably from the left) argue it less on policy, than on political, grounds. Obama needs these fellows- not for their advice but to encourage the belief among liberals that the President panders to the Washington insiders and moderates strictly to be re-elected. It fosters the hope that if and when re-elected, President Obama will revert to the ideological stance of State Senator and U.S. Senator Barack Obama. Nevertheless, some observers understand, as does Will Bunch, who comments

I'm 52 years old, and I'm constantly amazed at how much about human nature I still don't really get. What exactly goes on in Obama's mind? He's a smart and supposedly idealistic guy who came of age during the Reagan years, who surely -- those first times he dared to dream about the Oval Office -- saw himself taking all the obvious hypocrisy. Instead, he is taking presidential hypocrisy to new levels. What switch got turned off, or on, that stops him from ordering a halt to the mistreatment of Bradley Manning?

How does Barack Obama look in the mirror some mornings?

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