Author: chasdarwin

Active in Americans United, Center For Inquiry, and ACLU

What Recovery? You Probably Became Poorer In the Last 10 Years

From 2003-2013, ordinary Americans lost a third of their wealth.

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Source: AlterNet

Author: Lynn Stuart Parramore

 You sense it when you look at your retirement account. You feel it when the bills come in. According to new research supported by the Russell Sage Foundation, your instinct is right: you are very likely getting poorer.

For the study, researchers gathered information on families in the middle of the wealth distribution continuum. What they found is that in 2003, the inflation-adjusted net worth for the typical household was $87,992. Fast-forward 10 years: that figure is down to a mere $56,335.

Ordinary Americans got 36 percent poorer in just a decade.

The Great Recession and the bursting of the housing bubble did their damage, but a long list of additional factors have helped funnel money out of the hands of regular Americans and into the pockets of the rich, including deregulation, high unemployment and job insecurity, the shareholder value trend in which corporations focus on manipulating stock prices while throwing workers under the bus, the reduced influence of unions, the shredding of the social safety net, privatization, and tax structures which favor the rich.

And once the inequality train leaves the station, it only gathers speed until something stops it. As Thomas Piketty has recently emphasized, the rich get richer faster than you and me because of the rate of return on their wealth.

Underlying all of this is the spread of faulty economic thinking throughout academia, political circles and the mainstream press. Neoclassical economics, or so-called free-market ideology, essentially serves as the official justification for inequality, promoting mythologies about the rich as the great job creators (when they are actually job destroyers), the presumed benefits of inequality such as innovation (check the Scandinavian countries to debunk that one, where innovation thrives but inequality does not), and a host of similar nonsense.

The upshot is that regular people have endured one of the worst periods in recent memory. It will not surprise you to learn that during the same decade of 2003-2013, the rich were partying down. In the 95th percentile of wealth distribution, people got 14 percent richer.

To put all this in perspective, let’s take a look at another 10-year period, from 1937 to 1947. This decade witnessed something called the “Great Compression,” when income inequality in America plunged. The tax structure was addressed so that the rich paid their share, unions became a powerful force and regulation helped stabilize the financial sector and corporate America. Workers won protections and America’s middle-class blossomed and Americans enjoyed a period of low inequality for the next three decades.

By the 1970s, what’s known as the “Great Divergence” kicked off, with the rich gradually gobbling up more and more of the country’s wealth.

The authors of the Russell Sage study do not have much hope that America’s wealth disparity will get better any time soon: “The American economy has experienced rising income and wealth inequality for several decades, and there is little evidence that these trends are likely to reverse in the near term.”

As we can see from the Great Compression, it doesn’t have to be this way. Things won’t get better on their own, however: Inequality needs an intervention.

Lynn Parramore is an AlterNet senior editor. She is cofounder of Recessionwire, founding editor of New Deal 2.0, and author of “Reading the Sphinx: Ancient Egypt in Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture.” She received her Ph.D. in English and cultural theory from NYU. She is the director of AlterNet’s New Economic Dialogue Project. Follow her on Twitter @LynnParramore.

Emphasis Mine

See:http://www.alternet.org/economy/what-recovery-you-probably-became-poorer-last-10-years?akid=12061.123424.FdFn1w&rd=1&src=newsletter1013200&t=5Lynn Stuart Parramore

Paul Ryan’s New Clothes

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Source: National Memo

Author:E. J. Dionne

Paul Ryan is counting on this: Because he says he wants to preserve a safety net, speaks with concern about poor people and put out a 73-page report, many will slide over the details of the proposals he made last week in his major anti-poverty speech.

The Wisconsin Republican congressman is certainly aware that one of the biggest political difficulties he and his conservative colleagues face is that many voters suspect them of having far more compassion for a wealthy person paying taxes than for a poor or middle-income person looking for a job.

So Ryan gave a well-crafted address at the American Enterprise Institute in which the centerpiece sounded brand spanking new: the “Opportunity Grant.” The problem is that this “pilot program” amounts to little more than the stale conservative idea of wrapping federal programs into a block grant and shipping them off to the states. The good news is that Ryan only proposes “experiments” involving “a select number of states,” so he would not begin eliminating programs wholesale. Thank God for small favors.

Ryan surrounds his retread idea with the language of innovation. “The idea would be, let states try different ways of providing aid and then to test the results — in short, more flexibility in exchange for more accountability,” he declared. “My thinking basically is, get rid of these bureaucratic formulas.”

Who can possibly like those “bureaucratic formulas”? The phrase is another disguise. Among the programs Ryan would block grant are food stamps (now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP). Food stamps are one of our most valuable initiatives because people are automatically eligible for them when they lose a job or their income drops sharply. Studies have amply documented how important food stamps are to the well-being of children.

For the economy and for the disadvantaged, curtailing SNAP would be devastating. While providing nutrition help to families in desperate need, food stamps also offer an immediate economic stimulus at moments when the economy is losing purchasing power. Economists call such programs “automatic stabilizers.”

Ryan’s block grant would not be nearly as responsive to economic changes. If Congress would have to step in, its reaction would be slow. And the history of Ryan’s own budgets shows that increasing spending for poor people is not exactly a priority on his side of politics.

Food stamps aren’t the only programs that get wrapped into the grant. Housing vouchers go there, too, which could lead to more homelessness. So does money for child care. Ryan says there would be rules barring states from using funding from his Opportunity Grant for purposes other than helping the needy. But it’s not clear from his outline how he’d stop states from using their new flexibility to move spending away from the needy indirectly by substituting block grant money for existing expenditures.

Ryan might reply: You just don’t trust the states! And my answer would be: You’re absolutely right, there are some states I don’t trust to stand up for their poor people. I’d point specifically to the 24 states that are depriving roughly 5 million Americans of health insurance because they refuse to participate in the Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act.

In his speech and report, Ryan movingly described two hypothetical Americans, “Andrea” and “Steven,” and how much they could benefit from intense counseling by a case worker. There may well be something to this, but it’s expensive. How much would states have to cut basic assistance to the poor to hire additional case workers?

And by the way, one of the programs Ryan would eliminate to pay for an undoubtedly positive part of his plan — a roughly $500-a-year increase in the Earned Income Tax

Credit (EITC) for childless workers — is the Social Services Block Grant, which helps pay for the kinds of interventions he wants for Andrea and Steven.

There is such a hunger for something other than partisanship that the temptation is to praise the new Ryan for being better than the old Ryan and to leave it at that. It’s good that he moved on the EITC and also that he embraced sentencing reform. I also like his suggestion that we re-examine occupational licensing rules.

But forgive me if I see his overall proposal as a nicely presented abdication of federal responsibility for the poor. “Experimenting” with people’s food-stamp money is not something we should sign onto.

E.J. Dionne’s email address is ejdionne@washpost.com. Twitter: @EJDionne.

Emphasis Mine

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Poll: Americans Strongly Reject Impeaching, Suing Obama

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Source: National Memo

Author: Harry Decker

 

Over the past several weeks, Republicans have increasingly insisted that something has to be done about President Barack Obama’s tyrannical abuse of power. According to a new poll, the rest of the country completely disagrees.

According to a CNN/ORC poll released Friday, the vast majority of Americans oppose plans to sue or impeach the president.

The poll finds that 65 percent of Americans reject the idea of impeaching President Obama. Just 33 percent think he should be removed from office.

Republicans are much more open to the idea, however. They support impeachment by an overwhelming 57 to 42 percent margin. Self-described conservatives also back impeachment, 56 to 44 percent.

House Speaker John Boehner’s push to sue the president — which is widely viewed as a substitute for the politically unpalatable impeachment option — is similarly unpopular. Just 41 percent of Americans back the lawsuit idea, while 57 percent oppose it.

Unsurprisingly, Republicans don’t agree with the majority of the country; by a 75 to 22 percent margin, they say that the House should sue. Conservatives agree, 64 to 33 percent.

Americans don’t just oppose Republicans’ proposed solutions to the supposed problem of Obama’s imperial presidency. They don’t see a problem at all – 45 percent say that President Obama has gone too far in expanding the power of the presidency and executive branch. But 30 percent say that his use of executive authority has been about right, and 22 percent say he has not gone far enough.

The results suggest that Democrats’ plan to aggressively use the GOP’s lawsuit and impeachment talk against them in the midterm elections could pay dividends.

It should also raise red flags for congressional Republicans who are prepared to leave Washington for the August recess without passing any immigration legislation. If President Obama follows through on his threat to use executive action to patch the immigration system, these numbers suggest that he could have the political cover to do so.

Emphasis Mine

See: http://www.nationalmemo.com/poll-americans-strongly-reject-impeaching-suing-obama/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=NM_Master_List&utm_campaign=Daily%20Newsletter%20-%20july%2026%202014&utm_content=B

Scientists Discover the Fascinating Psychological Reason Why Conservatives Are…Conservative

Right-wing ideology is tailored to a particular psychological profile.

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Source: Mother Jones via AlterNet

Author: Chris Mooney

The following story first appeared on Mother Jones. Click here to subscribe for more great content. 

You could be forgiven for not having browsed yet through the latest issue of the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences. If you care about politics, though, you’ll find a punchline therein that is pretty extraordinary.

Behavioral and Brain Sciences employs a rather unique practice called “Open Peer Commentary”: An article of major significance is published, a large number of fellow scholars comment on it, and then the original author responds to all of them. The approach has many virtues, one of which being that it lets you see where a community of scholars and thinkers stand with respect to a controversial or provocative scientific idea. And in the latest issue of the journal, this process reveals the following conclusion: A large body of political scientists and political psychologists now concur that liberals and conservatives disagree about politics in part because they are different people at the level of personality, psychology, and even traits like physiology and genetics.

That’s a big deal. It challenges everything that we thought we knew about politics—upending the idea that we get our beliefs solely from our upbringing, from our friends and families, from our personal economic interests, and calling into question the notion that in politics, we can really change (most of us, anyway).

The occasion of this revelation is a paper by John Hibbing of the University of Nebraska and his colleagues, arguing that political conservatives have a “negativity bias,” meaning that they are physiologically more attuned to negative (threatening, disgusting) stimuli in their environments. (The paper can be read for free here.) In the process, Hibbing et al. marshal a large body of evidence, including their own experiments using eye trackers and other devices to measure the involuntary responses of political partisans to different types of images. One finding? That conservatives respond much more rapidly to threatening and aversive stimuli (for instance, images of “a very large spider on the face of a frightened person, a dazed individual with a bloody face, and an open wound with maggots in it,” as one of their papers put it).

In other words, the conservative ideology, and especially one of its major facets—centered on a strong military, tough law enforcement, resistance to immigration, widespread availability of guns—would seem well tailored for an underlying, threat-oriented biology.

The authors go on to speculate that this ultimately reflects an evolutionary imperative. “One possibility,” they write, “is that a strong negativity bias was extremely useful in the Pleistocene,” when it would have been super-helpful in preventing you from getting killed. (The Pleistocene epoch lasted from roughly 2.5 million years ago until 12,000 years ago.) We had John Hibbing on the Inquiring Minds podcast earlier this year, and he discussed these ideas in depth.

Hibbing and his colleagues make an intriguing argument in their latest paper, but what’s truly fascinating is what happened next. Twenty-six different scholars or groups of scholars then got an opportunity to tee off on the paper, firing off a variety of responses. But as Hibbing and colleagues note in their final reply, out of those responses, “22 or 23 accept the general idea” of a conservative negativity bias, and simply add commentary to aid in the process of “modifying it, expanding on it, specifying where it does and does not work,” and so on. Only about three scholars or groups of scholars seem to reject the idea entirely.

That’s pretty extraordinary, when you think about it. After all, one of the teams of commenters includes New York University social psychologist John Jost, who drew considerable political ire in 2003 when he and his colleagues published a synthesis of existing psychological studies on ideology, suggesting that conservatives are characterized by traits such as a need for certainty and an intolerance of ambiguity. Now, writing in Behavioral and Brain Sciences in response to Hibbing roughly a decade later, Jost and fellow scholars note that

There is by now evidence from a variety of laboratories around the world using a variety of methodological techniques leading to the virtually inescapable conclusion that the cognitive-motivational styles of leftists and rightists are quite different. This research consistently finds that conservatism is positively associated with heightened epistemic concerns for order, structure, closure, certainty, consistency, simplicity, and familiarity, as well as existential concerns such as perceptions of danger, sensitivity to threat, and death anxiety. [Italics added]

Back in 2003, Jost and his team were blasted by Ann Coulter, George Will, and National Review for saying this; congressional Republicans began probing into their research grants; and they got lots of hate mail. But what’s clear is that today, they’ve more or less triumphed. They won a field of converts to their view and sparked a wave of new research, including the work of Hibbing and his team.

Granted, there are still many issues yet to be worked out in the science of ideology. Most of the commentaries on the new Hibbing paper are focused on important but not-paradigm-shifting side issues, such as the question of how conservatives can have a higher negativity bias, and yet not have neurotic personalities. (Actually, if anything, the research suggests that liberals may be the more neurotic bunch.) Indeed, conservatives tend to have a high degree of happiness and life satisfaction. But Hibbing and colleagues find no contradiction here. Instead, they paraphrase two other scholarly commentators (Matt Motyl of the University of Virginia and Ravi Iyer of the University of Southern California), who note that “successfully monitoring and attending negative features of the environment, as conservatives tend to do, may be just the sort of tractable task…that is more likely to lead to a fulfilling and happy life than is a constant search for new experience after new experience.”

All of this matters, of course, because we still operate in politics and in media as if minds can be changed by the best honed arguments, the most compelling facts.

(N.B.: George Lakoff is vindicated here… in Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Thinkis a 1996 book by cognitive linguist George Lakoff. It argues that conservatives and liberals hold two different conceptual models of morality. Conservatives have a Strict Father morality in which people are made good through self-discipline and hard work, everyone is taken care of by taking care of themselves. Liberals have a Nurturant Parent morality in which everyone is taken care of by helping each other. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Politics_%28book%29)

And yet if our political opponents are simply perceiving the world differently, that idea starts to crumble. Out of the rubble just might arise a better way of acting in politics that leads to less dysfunction and less gridlock…thanks to science.

Chris Mooney is the author of four books, including “The Republican War on Science” (2005). His next book, “The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science—and Reality,” is due out in April.

Emphasis Mine

See:http://www.alternet.org/scientists-discover-fascinating-psychological-reason-why-conservatives-areconservative?akid=12050.123424.5BUcFW&rd=1&src=newsletter1012747&t=8

Krugman Divulges Real Reason Conservatives Freak Out About California Success Story

Right-wingers just hate when promised catastrophes don’t materialize.

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Source: AlterNet

Author: Janet Allon

 Paul Krugman feels terribly sorry for conservatives who predict doom whenever taxes slightly, and social programs are delivered, and then, lo and behold, the promised catastrophe does not materialize. You’d think they’d scurry away, tails between legs, issuing mea culpas and feeling horrible about themselves.

In Friday’s column, he discusses California, the “left coast,” where Governor Jerry Brown had the audacity to push through a modestly liberal agenda of higher taxes and spending, a higher minimum wage, and enthusiastic implementation of Obamacare.

The horror, conservatives said. As Krugman writes:

A representative reaction: Daniel J. Mitchell of the Cato Institute declared that by voting for Proposition 30, which authorized those tax increases, “the looters and moochers of the Golden State” (yes, they really do think they’re living in an Ayn Rand novel)  were committing “economic suicide.” Meanwhile, Avik Roy of the Manhattan Institute and Forbes claimed that California residents were about to face  a “rate shock” that would more than double health insurance premiums.

Well, darned if the catastrophe didn’t happen. Krugman offers numbers, as he usually does, to bolster his case:

If tax increases are causing a major flight of jobs from California, you can’t see it in the job numbers. Employment is up 3.6 percent in the past 18 months, compared with a national average of 2.8 percent; at this point, California’s share of national employment, which was hit hard by the bursting of the state’s enormous housingbubble, is back to pre-recession levels.

On health care, some people — basically healthy young men who were getting inexpensive insurance on the individual market and were too affluent to receive subsidies — did face premium increases, which we always knew would happen. Over all, however, the costs of health reform came in below expectations, while enrollment came in well above — more than triple initial predictions in the San Francisco area. A recent survey by the Commonwealth Fund suggests that  California has already cut the percentage of its residents without health insurance in half. What’s more, all indications are that further progress is in the pipeline, with  more insurance companies entering the marketplace for next year.

And, yes,  the budget is back in surplus.

But does the stubborn right flank ever examine the actual results, search their souls and reconsider their positions? Ha! Instead they just try to downplay the good news. California is not adding jobs as fast as Texas, they say. Gotta be the tax rates.

For the big difference between the two states, aside from the size of the oil and gas sector, isn’t tax rates. it’s  housing prices. Despite the bursting of the bubble, home values in California are still double the national average, while in Texas they’re 30 percent below that average. So a lot more people are moving to Texas even though wages and productivity are lower than they are in California.

And while some of this difference in housing prices reflects geography and population density — Houston is still spreading out, while Los Angeles, hemmed in by mountains, has reached its natural limits — it also reflects  California’s highly restrictive land-use policies, mostly imposed by local governments rather than the state.  As Harvard’s Edward Glaeser has pointed out, there is some truth to the claim that states like Texas are growing fast thanks to their anti-regulation attitude, “but the usual argument focuses on the wrong regulations.” And taxes aren’t important at all.

The lesson of the California comeback is a familiar, but it bears repeating. “You should take anti-government propaganda with large helpings of salt,” Krugman writes. “Tax increases aren’t economic suicide; sometimes they’re a useful way to pay for things we need. Government programs, like Obamacare, can work if the people running them want them to work, and if they aren’t sabotaged from the right. In other words, California’s success is a demonstration that the extremist ideology still dominating much of American politics is nonsense.”

Emphasis Mine

See:http://www.alternet.org/economy/krugman-divulges-real-reason-conservatives-freak-out-about-california-success-story?akid=12054.123424.eyAYQu&rd=1&src=newsletter1012840&t=7

 

Huddling With Ukrainian Rebels in a Bunker on the Front Lines

“No way in hell we’ll lay down our weapons while the fascists are still around”

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007

Source:New Republic

Author: Noah Sneider

SAUR-MOGILA—From the base of a big stone obelisk, the soldiers scour the valley below their hill. They look out from army green binoculars with chipped paint and a hammer-and-sickle insignia. They see fascists and Nazis, and they say they will fight to the death.

They set up a rusty rifle, stamped “1942,” and send a volley into a cluster of trees. They watch smoke rise. They laugh.

“No way in hell we’ll lay down our weapons while the fascists are still around,” says one of them, a burly man named Gena.

This is not 1942. It is 2014, just two days after the tragic downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. I am standing on Saur-Mogila, one of the highest points in eastern Ukraine’s Donbass region, with a group of pro-Russian separatists who have been fending off attacks on this position from government forces since May. Western intelligence suggests that the missile that struck the plane came from somewhere in the fields further down. But to the rebel fighters here, it might as well have come from Kuala Lumpur. They are at war with Kiev and its Western allies, and the plane crash is an enemy plot. They’ve gotta hold this hillside, dammit.

This hill is “a sacred place,” adds Gena, who, like all the fighters interviewed, gave only a first name. Here, the Soviets pushed back Hitler’s army, losing some 23,000 troops along what was called the Mius-Front. During peacetime, local kids search Saur-Mogila (“Hill 277.9” to the Germans) for traces of World War II—old ammo, knives, pistols, rifles, helmets. A monument now towers over everything, an obelisk more than 100 feet tall with an attached cast-iron statue of a “soldier-liberator” raising a gun in triumph. The rebels have raised a Russian flag atop the tower, and the Ukrainians have sent a bullet through the statue’s heart. For the separatists, they are following in their forefathers footsteps. “In World War II our grandfathers held this hill, and now we too are holding it,” says Andrei, a member of the Vostok Battalion, a powerful rebel militia.

There was hope that the tragedy of MH17 would force Russia, Ukraine, and the rebels to wake up from their post-Soviet fever dream. But following the crash, the parallel realities that exist across eastern Ukraine only became sharper. Prospects for peace have all but disappeared. Among rebels, blaming the Ukrainian forces for downing MH17 is an article of faith. Most locals (fed by the Russian media) agree, seeing it as a plot concocted in Kiev to discredit the separatist movement. And the Ukrainian forces, meanwhile, have pressed their offensive further, both at Saur-Mogila and around the cities of Donetsk and Luhansk.

When I first arrive at Saur-Mogila, travelling with two colleagues, I notice craters alongside the road leading up to the peak. Ahead are tank tracks, and the asphalt street is split with a big silver shell. All around, dirt and debris and the detritus that speak of airstrikes. Above, at the top of the hill, a pack of rebels mill about. They look like giants from below. But they descend to meet us, and turn out to be small and scruffy.

The encounter is emblematic of the war in Ukraine: fought from afar against inhuman opponents. Neither side wants to look the other in the eye, because to do so would be to acknowledge that, for the most part, they aren’t fighting Nazis and terrorists, but neighbors and countrymen.

When Hitler and Stalin had it out here, George Orwell wrote of a force that he called “nationalism.” He did not mean allegiance to a nation-state though, but the conviction around which one can construct a reality. “Having picked his side, [the nationalist] persuades himself that it is the strongest, and is able to stick to his belief even when the facts are overwhelmingly against him,” Orwell writes. “Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception. Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty, but he is also—since he is conscious of serving something bigger than himself—unshakeably certain of being in the right.”

This is what is missed about the war in Ukraine: Behind the high-profile Russian agents who lead the separatists are scores of men, mostly locals, who believe—truly, madly, willing-to-die believe—that they are doing the right thing. These are not the mustachioed villains you see on television.

These are factory workers and mechanics who now man checkpoints and lead military operations. The world they live in is filled with fascist threats from far-away lands. It is a world constructed largely on the basis of baseless Russian propaganda—easy to scoff at, but for these men, it’s real.

The gold-toothed commander at Saur-Mogila, Niloka, leads us up the hill, weaving around the craters. “To the right of us, a kilometer out, they’re there,” he says, pointing up beyond the monument. He chats on a walkie-talkie, barking commands with the assurance of a seasoned fighter: “That’s it, got it. I give the order: fire.” Black wires run through the grass. Field telephones, they tell us, Soviet antiques, TA-57s, like the ones their grandpas used. He brings us up to a set of small stone buildings, past a soldier cooking soup on an open flame, and down into a bunker. Two rounds of Grads rockets hit somewhere on the other side of the hill—they are fired in an immediate series and land rhythmically, like a bad dubstep baseline.

In the bunker we sit on a brown leather couch. Belts of machine gun ammunition fill wooden crates on the floor. Two sleeping pads—one silver and the other camouflage—lie against the far wall. On a messy table stands a can of stewed meat, opened but only half-eaten.

They’ve taken over an entertainment complex that used to welcome tourists to the monument—it once had a bar, a cafe, even a banya. Since mid-April war has crept slowly into the Donbass, filling the sunflower fields and the steppe. Once, in between rounds of shelling last month, a young couple drove up this hill in a Mazda, perhaps looking for somewhere to watch the stars. They didn’t know that their make-out spot had become a regular battle site.

The men here remain resolute, their speech a mixture of banter and braggadocio. They repeat the now familiar litany of complaints about cultural and religious assault, language rights, and western-sponsored “juntas.” They have no plans to back down. “My comrades have already died in this war,” says a fighter named Roma, with black aviators perched on his cap.

Outside the bunker, I run into a Maksim, a young fighter from the town of Druzhkovka, north of Donetsk. We first met nearly three months ago in Slovyansk, around the time he and his dad enlisted in the militia together. Back then, he was kind-eyed and timid, hanging around the fringes of his new base, reluctant to handle his weapon. Now he wears a black balaclava rolled atop his head, and carries his AK with swagger: in one hand, swinging at his side.

“This only ends one way,” he tells me, staring up at the clouds. “They leave.”

Noah Sneider is a writer and artist. He works as a journalist based in Moscow, and is on Twitter @noahsneider.

Emphasis Mine

See: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/118837/camping-out-ukrainian-rebels-aftermath-mh-17?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=TNR%20Daily%20Newsletter&utm_campaign=TNR%20Daily%20Zephyr%20with%20LiveIntent%20-%20July%2025%2C%202014&utm_content=Final

7 Ways U.S. Foreign Policy Would Be Even More Disastrous If There Were a Republican in the White House

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Source:AlterNet

Author:Robert Kuttner

 
 
 
 
 

It’s hard to recall a time when the world presented more crises with fewer easy solutions. And for the Republicans, all of these woes have a common genesis: American weakness projected by Barack Obama.

People in the Middle East, former Vice President Dick Cheney said recently, “are absolutely convinced that the American capacity to lead and influence in that part of the world has been dramatically reduced by this president.” He added, “We’ve got a problem with weakness, and it’s centered right in the White House.”

Really? It’s instructive to ask: What exactly would a Republican president advised by Cheney do in each of these crises? Let’s take them one at a time.

Iraq. It’s now clear that Cheney’s invasion of Iraq and its subsequent Shiite client state under Nouri al-Maliki only deepened sectarian strife and laid the groundwork for another brand of Islamist radicalism, this time in the form of ISIS, and more backlash against the U.S. for creating the mess. What’s the solution — a permanent U.S. military occupation of Iraq? Republican presidential candidates should try running on that one.

Syria. Obama took a lot of criticism for equivocating on where the bright line was when it came to Syrian use of chemical warfare. In fact, American military pressure and diplomacy has caused Syrian president Assad to get rid of chemical weapons. But the deeper Syrian civil war is another problem from hell. How about it, Republican candidates — More costly military supplies to moderate radicals, whoever the hell they are? A U.S invasion? See how that plays in the 2016 campaign.

Israel-Palestine. A two-state solution seems further away than ever, and time is not on the Israeli side. No American president has had the nerve to tell the Israeli government to stop building settlements on Arab lands, despite $3 billion a year on U.S. aid to Israel. What Would Jesus Do? (What would Cheney do?)

Putin and Ukraine.Russian President Putin’s fomenting of military adventures by ethnic Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine has created a needless crisis. But our European friends, who have trade deals with Russia, don’t want to make trouble. So, what will it be — a new U.S.-led Cold War without European support? A hot war?

Iran’s Nuclear Capacity.The policy of détente with Iran in exchange for controls on Iranian ability to weaponize enriched uranium is a gamble that could well pay off. The alternative course of bombing Iran, either ourselves or via a proxy Israeli strike, seems far more of a gamble. Who’s the realist here?

China’s New Muscle. The U.S., under Democratic and Republican presidents alike, has become pitifully dependent on borrowing from China. Our biggest corporations have put the attractions of cheap Chinese labor ahead of continuing production in the U.S.A., creating a chronic trade deficit that requires all that borrowing. Now, China is throwing around its economic weight everywhere from its own backyard in East Asia to Africa and South America. Our troubles with Putin have helped promote a closer alliance between Moscow and Beijing. Anyone have a nice silver bullet for this one?

Those Central American Kids.What do you think — failure of immigration policy or humanitarian refugee crisis? On the one hand, American law says that bona fide refugees can apply for asylum and that children who are being trafficked fall into the category of refugees. On the other hand America is never going to take all the world’s refugees. Border Patrol agents interviewing terrified nine-year-olds lack the capacity to determine who is a true candidate for asylum. If shutting down the border — ours or Mexico’s — were the easy solution, we would have done it decades ago.

And I haven’t even gotten to Afghanistan, or the problem of nuclear proliferation, or new Jihadist weapons that can evade airport detection systems, or the total failure of democracy to gain ground in the Middle East.

The Republican story seems to be: we don’t need to bog down in details — somehow, it’s all Obama’s fault.

Here’s what these crises have in common.

  • They have no easy solutions, military or diplomatic, and U.S. leverage is limited.
  • They are deeply rooted in regional geo-politics. U.S. projection of either bravado or prudence has little to do with how recent events have unfolded.
  • Some of these crises were worsened by earlier U.S. policy mistakes, such as the Cheney-Bush invasion of Iraq, or the bipartisan indulgence of Israeli building of settlements, or the one-sided industrial deals with China, or 20th-century alliances with Middle Eastern despots to protect oil interests.

When I was growing up, there was a nice clean division between the good guys and the bad guys. Hitler was the ultimate bad guy. Or maybe it was Stalin. America won World War II, and we won the Cold War when the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union collapsed.

(N.B.: Did America win the cold war?  Japan did.)

Policy choices were easy only in retrospect. The neat world of good guys and bad guys started coming apart with the Vietnam War.

Today’s crises are nothing like the ones of that simple era. Who are the good guys and bad guys in Syria and in Iraq? In China’s diplomacy in South America? Among the murdered Israeli and Palestinian children and the children seeking refuge at our southern border?

To the extent that policy options are even partly military, the American public has no stomach for multiple invasions and occupations.

As Republican jingoists scapegoat President Obama for all the world’s ills and try to impose a simple story of weakness and strength on events of stupefying complexity, you have to hope that the American people have more of an attention span than usual.

 

Emphasis Mine
See:http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/7-ways-americas-foreign-policy-would-be-even-more-disastrous-if-there-were?akid=12047.123424.v-qgQc&rd=1&src=newsletter1012567&t=10

Health Insurance for Millions Threatened; Republicans Celebrate

But what actually had them so pleased is the possibility that millions of Americans will lose their health insurance.

chasdarwinLeave a comment

Source: American Prospect

Author: Paul Waldman

If they’re wondering why Americans think their party is cruel and unfeeling, well here you go. And will the news media tell these people’s stories? When news broke this morning of the decision by a three-judge panel from the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in Halbig v. Burwell, which states that because of a part of one sentence in the Affordable Care Act that was basically a typo, millions of Americans should lose the federal subsidies that allowed them to buy health insurance, I’m pretty sure a similar scene played out all around Washington. As word spread through the offices of conservative think-tanks, advocacy groups, and members of Congress, people gathered around TVs or computer screens, quickly taking in the decision. And there were smiles, laughter, maybe even a few high-fives and fist-pumps.

Not long after, a second appeals court handed down an opposite ruling on the same question. (If you feel like you don’t understand the issue, the rulings, and the implications, I’d recommend Ian Millhiser’s explanation.) We won’t know for some time whether the Supreme Court will hear these cases and. if it does, it’s hard to predict what the justices will decide. But back to those conservatives: What they were so excited about was, in a narrow sense, that they had seemingly won a victory over the villainous Barack Obama and his freedom-destroying Affordable Care Act. But what actually had them so pleased is the possibility that millions of Americans will lose their health insurance.

Am I being unfair? Well here’s a challenge. Let’s see if anybody can point me to a single prominent conservative—member of Congress, movement figure, media figure—whose response to that decision is not just what they’re all saying (some variant of “This just shows what a terrible law Obamacare is”) but also something like, “Of course, we don’t want anyone to lose their health coverage, so if this decision is upheld we should pass a law correcting the drafting error that gave rise to this case and making sure those millions of Americans can keep getting the subsidies that make it possible for them to buy private insurance.”  If they really cared about those millions of Americans and their fate, they’d want to do something about it, now that the lawsuit they filed threatens to take away that health coverage. So what are they going to do? The answer is, nothing. There will be precisely zero conservatives who propose to actually help those people. And if you ask the lawsuit’s supporters what should happen to them, none will have anything resembling a practical suggestion. At best, they’ll say that the millions who would lose their insurance if the decision stands were snookered by that con man Obama into thinking they could have affordable health coverage, so it’s really all his fault.

The next time Republicans are wondering why so many people think their party is cruel and uncaring and will gladly crush the lives of ordinary people if it means gaining some momentary partisan advantage, they might think back to this case. They might remind themselves that the problem isn’t that Americans just don’t fully comprehend the majesty of Republican philosophy. It’s that they see it quite well.

And while we’re at it, here’s a question for the news media. Remember when people got those letters from their insurance companies saying their old plans would be cancelled, and you went into a frenzy of ill-informed and misleading coverage telling their alleged tales of woe? I know, you feel bad for not doing any follow-ups showing how most of them ended up with coverage that was more comprehensive, less expensive, or both. But here’s your chance for redemption! How about you do an equal number of stories—oh, who am I kidding?—how about you do half as many stories telling the tales of people who got coverage because of the subsidies, and would lose it if the Halbig decision stands?

You wouldn’t have to work too hard to find them—after all, almost nine out of every ten people who bought insurance on the exchange got a subsidy, and their premiums were reduced by an average of 76 percent. If you’re in Washington, just go to Virginia, which used the federal exchange, and you can find plenty of people who would lose their coverage if Halbig stands; if you’re in New York, hop across the river to New Jersey. Those stories are out there waiting to be told, and showing how things like court decisions affect regular people is part of your job, not just when it makes the administration look bad, but even if it supports their position. Right?

Emphasis Mine

See:http://prospect.org/article/health-insurance-millions-threatened-republicans-celebrate

Why the Democrats Need to Take Sides

Straddling class divisions is so last century. There’s a new base in town, and it includes a lot of people who used to be middle-class but aren’t anymore.

chasdarwinLeave a comment

Source: American Prospect

Author: Harold Meyerson

This spring, a prominent Democratic pollster sent a memo to party leaders and Democratic elected officials advising them to speak and think differently. The nation’s economy had deteriorated so drastically, he cautioned, that they needed to abandon their references to the “middle class,” substituting for those hallowed words the phrase “working people.” “In today’s harsh economic reality,” he wrote, “many voters no longer identify as middle class.”

How many voters? In 2008, a Pew poll asked Americans to identify themselves by class. Fifty-three percent said they were middle-class; 25 percent said lower-class. When Pew asked the same question this January, it found that the number who’d called themselves middle-class had shrunk to 44 percent, while those who said they were of the lower class had grown from 25 percent to 40 percent.

Americans’ assessment of their place in the nation’s new economic order is depressingly accurate. Though most of the jobs lost in the 2007–2009 recession were in middle-income industries, the lion’s share of the jobs created in the half-decade since have been in such low-paying sectors as retail and restaurants. Median household income has declined in every year of the recovery. The share of the nation’s income going to wages and salaries, which for decades held steady at two-thirds, has in recent years descended to 58 percent—the lowest level since the government began its measurements.

The waning of America’s middle class presents a huge challenge to the nation’s oldest political party. The Democrats’ ability to improve the economic lives of most Americans has been their primary calling card to the nation’s voters ever since Franklin Roosevelt became president. Since the 1940s, however, the Democrats’ preferred method of helping working- and middle-class Americans has tilted more toward spurring economic growth than aggressive redistribution. So long as the growth in the nation’s economy registered in the pocketbooks of most Americans, there was little need to adopt policies that put a high priority on, say, redirecting profits into wages.

And that was fine with the Democrats. When John F. Kennedy observed that “a rising tide lifts all boats,” he was not only accurately describing how the highly unionized and not-yet-globalized economy of the 1960s worked; he was also describing how the economy enabled the Democrats to establish a political framework in which they could seek and win support from both business and labor—from both Wall Street and Main Street.

But the kind of economy that once allowed the Democrats to be the world’s leading cross-class party has almost completely disappeared. American economic growth today goes to a relative handful of its wealthiest citizens—indeed, since the recovery began in 2009, 95 percent of the income growth has accrued to the wealthiest 1 percent, as University of California, Berkeley, economist Emmanuel Saez has shown. While the economy has grown by 20 percent since 2000, the median income for households headed by working-age Americans has shrunk by 12 percent. And as wages have sunk to a record-low share of the nation’s economy, the share going to profits has reached a record high.

The Democrats are hardly at death’s door. Abetted by the intransigence of a nativist, patriarchal, increasingly anti-science and fanatically anti-government Republican Party, they hold a commanding lead among the nation’s growing constituencies—Latinos, Asians, single mothers, millennials, and professionals. Demographics give the Democrats a clear edge in high-turnout elections, presidential elections most particularly. But demographics devoid of economics will sustain the party’s advantage for only so long—especially absent a serious plan for improving the prospects of today’s downwardly mobile. Bettering the economic lot of their constituents—particularly since those constituents are represented disproportionately among those Americans who now call themselves lower-class—will require the Democrats to do something they haven’t really contemplated, and have consistently avoided, since the 1930s: taking a side, with all that entails, in a class war.

Taking sides has never come naturally to the Democrats. Throughout its long history, the party has not merely contained multitudes but contradicted itself, frequently and ferociously. In 1860, confronted with the new Republican Party’s challenge to slavery, the Democratic Party split in two, nominating both a Northern and a Southern presidential candidate. In the early 20th century, its two centers of strength were the white, segregationist, nativist South and the urban political machines of such cities as New York and Boston, home to millions of Catholic and Jewish immigrants. The two groups clashed so irreconcilably on issues like Prohibition and the Ku Klux Klan (which reached its apogee in the 1920s by adding anti-Catholicism to its catalog of hatreds) that the party’s 1924 convention required two weeks and 103 ballots before it could settle on a presidential nominee—John W. Davis, an obscure Wall Street attorney—acceptable to both sides. It took the crisis of the Depression to compel the rival camps to call a truce and turn their attention to economic matters and to Franklin Roosevelt.

 

President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs into law the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, as Labor Secretary Frances Perkins stands behind him.

Roosevelt commanded substantial business support during his 1932 campaign and in his first two years as president, though he kept Wall Street at arm’s length. When he was assembling his Treasury team prior to taking office, someone suggested he consider appointing Russell Leffingwell, a leading executive at the J.P. Morgan investment bank, which was headquartered at 23 Wall Street. Roosevelt thought about it for a moment and then shot down the idea. “No,” he said. “We can’t have anyone from 23.”

As Roosevelt moved left in 1935, signing into law the National Labor Relations Act, the Social Security Act, and a substantially higher income tax for the wealthiest Americans, many of his former business backers, most prominently former Democratic National Chairman John J. Raskob, who’d been the financial vice president of both DuPont and General Motors, turned against him. They founded and funded the Liberty League, which throughout the 1936 presidential campaign relentlessly attacked Roosevelt as a socialist. On the election’s eve, secure in the knowledge that he was about to win an overwhelming victory, Roosevelt struck back. In an address, broadcast on national radio, to a screaming crowd at Madison Square Garden, FDR singled out “business and financial monopoly, speculation, [and] reckless banking” as enemies of social peace. “Government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob,” he continued. “Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred. I should like to have it said of my first administration that in it theforces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second administration that in it these forces met their master.”

Roosevelt’s speech remains the apogee of the Democrats’ taking up the cudgel of class war. No Democratic president or nominee has put it quite that way ever since. Nor, by the calculus of conventional politics, did Roosevelt’s successors need to. Economically, the New Deal reforms were a stunning success, setting in place the structures that ensured the 30-year boom that began with World War II would be felt across the economy. From 1947 through 1973, the nation’s productivity rose by 97 percent and its median compensation by 95 percent. Politically, the reforms fostered an era of Democratic dominance. An occasional Republican—Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon—would be elected president, but they did nothing to endanger the Democrats’ core economic programs. The Democrats’ hold on Congress during this period was almost unbroken.

The New Deal coalition broke up in the decades that followed, as many white Democrats rejected what they saw as the party’s targeting of tax dollars to help minorities. Pollster Stan Greenberg’s study of Macomb County, Michigan—a white working-class suburb of Detroit that had given John Kennedy 63 percent of the vote in his 1960 campaign against Richard Nixon and had given Ronald Reagan 66 percent in his 1980 campaign against Jimmy Carter—demonstrated that Macomb’s Democrats believed their party was taxing them to support Detroit’s African Americans.

The movement of the white South and elements of the white working class into the Republican column—a journey that began during Nixon’s presidency and has continued to this day—initially spurred centrist Democrats to push their party rightward on such issues as lengthening prison sentences and curtailing welfare. Ultimately, however, the wholesale flight of the white South into Republican ranks had the effect of greatly diminishing the divisions on racial, gender, and cultural issues that had rent the Democrats for much of the 20th century. As a Southernized Republican Party moved right on those issues, it prompted a countermovement from socially liberal professionals, many of whom had previously identified as Rockefeller Republicans, into Democratic ranks. As John Judis and Ruy Teixeira reported in their 2002 book The Emerging Democratic Majority, professionals—previously a solidly Republican constituency—backed the Democratic candidates in the elections of 1988 through 2000 by a margin of 52 percent to 40 percent. Henceforth, the issues that would divide the Democrats would be preponderantly economic.

During the 12 years in which Reagan and George H.W. Bush were president, centrist Democrats sought not only to win back the Reagan Democrats with more-conservative social and economic policies but also to cultivate more business donors for party candidates. Tony Coelho, a California congressman who spearheaded House Democrats’ fundraising efforts for much of the 1980s, shifted the balance of funds coming into the party’s coffers more toward Wall Street and other business interests. When political journalist Thomas Edsall, in his 1984 book The New Politics of Inequality, tallied the funds received by all congressional Democrats from business and conservative interests and compared the total to the funds they received from labor and liberal interests, he found that they evened out. The Democrats’ right-left funding ratio was 1 to 1. Republicans, by contrast, received $33 from business and conservative interests to every $1 they received from labor and liberal groups. Not surprisingly, on such fundamental economic questions as taxation, trade, and worker rights, Reagan-era Republicans had a clear sense of direction. Democrats were all over the map.

During Reagan’s presidency, and again during George W. Bush’s, centrist Democrats backed reductions in top tax rates that the Republican presidents had proposed. During the presidencies of Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama, House Democrats passed bills amending labor law so that workers could join unions without fear of being fired, but centrist Democratic senators kept those bills from passing in the upper house, while Carter and Obama—and Bill Clinton as well—failed to make labor-law reform a legislative priority. The fiercest battles in the Democrats’ class war have come over trade. A majority of House Democrats, echoing labor’s argument that such deals only hastened offshoring and job loss, voted against both the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1993 and establishing permanent normal trade relations (PNTR) with China in 2000. This year, three-quarters of party members have gone on record against fast-tracking the current proposed Trans-Pacific trade deal through Congress absent major modifications intended to preserve American jobs. Senate Democrats, who receive a higher percentage of their campaign funding from Wall Street (ever the most avid promoter of free trade) than House Democrats, backed NAFTA and PNTR.

It was Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, of course, who sent these trade deals to the Hill. Both had received major funding from the financial sector when they sought the presidency; both had selected as their chief financial advisers and policymakers a network of investment bankers and their protégés, Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, and Timothy Geithner most prominent among them. While backing many of their president’s more progressive social policies, this network also avidly promoted the trade deals, financial deregulation, and post-recession recovery measures that benefited Wall Street at the expense of the great majority of Americans. FDR’s reluctance to entrust the Treasury Department to Wall Street bankers did not get passed down to his more recent Democratic successors.

To be sure, Republican opposition to workers’ concerns has been the biggest and most constant impediment to Democrats’ initiatives on working Americans’ behalf. Nor is this to gainsay the epochal advances in racial and gender equality and economic security that the post-Roosevelt Democratic Party has helped realize. Medicare and Obamacare affirmed the nation’s responsibility for the health care of its citizens. Medicaid and a raft of other programs targeted various forms of public assistance to the poor. But none of these programs—nor any of the party’s signature civil-rights legislation—specifically sought to advance workers’ interests against their employers’. That had been taken care of by the National Labor Relations Act and minimum-wage legislation. That was a fait accompli. The party had been there and done that.

Except, as American capitalism changed, what the Democrats had done had come undone. As corporations steadily weakened their workers’ bargaining power by shifting work abroad and breaking their unions at home, the link between productivity and workers’ income was severed. Since 1979, the nation’s productivity has risen by 65 percent and its workers’ compensation by just 8 percent. As well, businesses have changed the forms of employment they offer. Workers who formerly would have been full-time employees have been labeled as independent contractors or listed as working for temporary-employment agencies—changes that have stripped from them the right to unionize and the protections of wage-and-hour laws. The number of part-time employees has ballooned.

The Democrats haven’t been insensible to working Americans’ concerns during these years. When they had the votes, they raised the minimum wage, increased the funding for college grants and loans, and initiated public-works programs during recessions. At the same time, however, they largely failed to grasp the full extent of the erosion of middle-income jobs, the decline in worker bargaining power, and the stagnation of Americans’ incomes (offset, until 2008, by the corresponding increase in Americans’ debt). The idea that the nation’s middle-class majority wasn’t a permanent axiom of American life, that it might one day cease to exist, simply didn’t occur to most party leaders, as it didn’t occur to most members of the country’s political and economic elites.Democrats now find themselves in an unfamiliar world—not of their making, exactly, but one whose creation they didn’t do much to retard. It’s a world where they can no longer deliver job-based prosperity—at least, not without radically altering their politics. Rebuilding that middle-class majority requires Democrats to embrace ideas and find a voice as new to them as the cadences of the New Deal were to the Democrats of 1933.

The new base of the Democratic Party appears primed for such a change. The share of liberals in party ranks has swelled. In 2000, Gallup reports, 44 percent of Democrats identified as moderates, and 29 percent as liberals. Today, the share of moderates has dropped to 36 percent, while that of liberals has increased to 43 percent.  This leftward movement at least partly reflects the growing weight of Latinos and millennials within Democratic ranks. Like African Americans, Latinos differ sharply from white Americans in their level of support for government. Asked in a 2012 Pew survey whether they preferred a smaller government with fewer services or a bigger government with more services, Latinos backed the bigger-government option by a 75 percent to 19 percent margin, even as the general population supported the smaller-government alternative by 48 percent to 41 percent. Since California Latinos began voting in large numbers in the mid-1990s, they have proved the state’s strongest supporters—even more than African Americans—of ballot measures protecting workers’ rights and authorizing more spending on schools.

As with Latinos, so with millennials. A Pew survey of those young Americans from March of this year found them to be the only age group in which the number identifying as liberals (31 percent) exceeded the number calling themselves conservative (26 percent). Fifty-three percent of millennials preferred the bigger-government-with-more-services option, and just 38 percent the smaller.

One reason millennials lean left, of course, is that each successively younger cohort of Americans contains a larger share of Latinos (not to mention Asians and secularists). White millennials preferred the smaller government option by 52 percent to 39 percent, but millennials of color supported the bigger-government alternative by a hefty 71 percent to 21 percent margin.

But millennials’ left-leaning politics is also the result of their having borne the brunt of the economy’s dysfunctions. It’s disproportionately the young who have been saddled with a trillion dollars in student-loan debt. It’s millennials who have experienced the highest levels of unemployment. Nor is their employment anything to boast about: In 2012, 44 percent of young college graduates were employed in jobs that didn’t require a college degree.

Small wonder, then, that America’s young adults harbor the greatest skepticism toward the nation’s economic system. A 2009 Center for American Progress survey showed that their view toward unions was 9 percentage points more favorable than the overall population’s. And a 2011 Pew Poll revealed the somewhat astonishing fact that 49 percent of millennials had a positive view of socialism, while just 46 percent of them viewed capitalism positively. (Just 31 percent of all Americans viewed socialism positively; 50 percent of them felt that way about capitalism.) The rising number of left-leaning Latinos and millennials gives Democrats sound reason for believing that their future is bright—assuming elections can be reduced to demographics. With Republicans working overtime to estrange nearly every growing group in the political landscape, while Democrats have championed such policies as the legalization of undocumented immigrants and equal rights for gays and lesbians, the demographic tide is certainly running in the Democrats’ direction. Minorities and the liberal young have already pushed America’s cities decidedly leftward: 26 of the largest 30 now have Democratic mayors, the greatest partisan imbalance in history. They have turned such onetime Republican bastions as Florida and Virginia into proto-Democratic states. Georgia and North Carolina, and, within two or three presidential-election cycles, Texas and Arizona will likely fall prey to the same purpling. To be sure, the movement of young people and African Americans out of some longtime Democratic bastions in the industrial Midwest, and the understandable reluctance of immigrants to move into this economically embattled region, may turn such states as Michigan into Election Day toss-ups. Any Republican gains in the Midwest, however, could be more than offset by the Democrats’ pickups in the South and Southwest. As the South—the Republican Party’s chief electoral fortress—edges into the Democratic column, the Democrats may be able to contemplate a new era of political dominance. Provided they can figure out how to reinvent broadly shared prosperity.  For despite their new adherents’ liberal leanings, the Democrats are sure to pay a price if they can’t arrest the downward spiral of Americans’ economic lives. The price isn’t likely to take the form of increased millennial or minority support for Republicans. More likely, many in these groups will just disengage from politics and cease showing up at the polls. Despite their liberalism and preference for a government that smooths out the economy’s increasingly jagged edges, young Americans don’t invest a lot of hope in the political process. Just 31 percent of millennials say they see a great deal of difference between the two parties—the lowest level of any age group in the Pew survey. Similarly, 50 percent of millennials identify as independents, while 27 percent call themselves Democrats and 17 percent say they’re Republicans. If the Democrats are to establish the enduring majority that many of them see in the offing, they will have to shift the rewards of economic growth from profits, dividends, and rents to the wages and salaries on which the majority of Americans depend.

Even in regions where Democrats dominate, numerical majorities will not suffice. The left-leaning constituencies need to form durable alliances—almost invariably in opposition to the prevailing Democratic establishments—in order to secure pro-worker reforms.It’s in America’s cities, home to the largest influx of immigrants and millennials, where this strategy has had the most effect. In New York, Boston, Seattle, Pittsburgh, New Haven, Minneapolis, Phoenix, Santa Fe, and a host of other municipalities, voters have elected progressive mayors and city council members whose candidacies were backed, and in many cases incubated, by these new alliances. The key players in these coalitions tend to be service-sector unions (representing janitors, hotel and health-care workers, supermarket clerks), immigrant-rights groups, working-class neighborhood organizations active in African-American communities (many of them successors to ACORN), and affordable-housing and environmental-justice advocates. The ordinances enacted by these new governments run the gamut of causes important to the cities’ working classes: raising the minimum wage, setting living-wage standards for city contract workers, mandating paid sick days, requiring developers to construct affordable housing in return for their building permits, reining in discriminatory police practices, and curtailing the police’s cooperation with federal officials seeking to deport noncriminal undocumented immigrants.

Although America’s demographic changes reach well beyond city lines, it’s only in these urban areas that the new Democratic and largely working-class constituencies have organized themselves sufficiently to attain power. The politics of California provides a case in point. No other state has seen its population so thoroughly transformed in the past three decades, with Latino and Asian immigrants not only pushing Los Angeles and the Bay Area further left but also moving many historically Republican regions—San Diego, northern Orange County, the Inland Empire, and parts of the San Joaquin Valley—solidly into the Democratic column. By the early 2000s, it was clear that the California Legislature would be under Democratic control for the foreseeable future. At which point, the state’s business community—oil companies, banks, apartment owners’ associations, chambers of commerce—began to cultivate candidates of their own in Democratic primaries. Since then, those primary contests frequently pit business-backed candidates against candidates supported by unions, environmentalists, and other progressives.

In the Bay Area and Los Angeles, the progressive candidates usually prevail. In other parts of the state, business-backed Democrats frequently win. In 2012, Democrats won more than two-thirds of the seats in both houses of the legislature, but while the legislature has enacted some significant progressive statutes, others have fallen victim to a coalition of the business Democrats and 2012, Democrats won more than two-thirds of the seats in both houses of the legislature, but while the legislature has enacted some significant progressive statutes, others have fallen victim to a coalition of the business Democrats and the Republicans. The defeated bills included one that would have put a moratorium on fracking and another that would have allowed San Francisco to slow the flood of evictions in hopes of keeping developers from eliminating what remains of the city’s affordable housing stock.

In late May, the Senate approved a bill raising the state minimum wage to $13 an hour. Notwithstanding the Democrats’ supermajority, the bill narrowly squeaked through, with business-backed Democrats abstaining, despite representing such working-class cities as Fresno, Stockton, and Santa Ana, where wages are notoriously low. Those are cities, however, where the kind of labor-left alliances that have formed around San Francisco and Los Angeles are still too weak to prevail electorally. Nationally, New York’s Working Families Party is the most successful alliance to have achieved sufficient density across an entire state to affect state-level politics, but it is still far stronger in New York City—whose new mayor, Bill de Blasio, was one of the party’s founders—than it is upstate. In Minnesota, another such statewide alliance scored a surprising victory in 2012 when it persuaded voters to reject a ballot measure that would have required them to produce photo IDs at polling places, but like the Working Families Party, it is far stronger in its state’s urban center, the Twin Cities, than elsewhere.

One impediment to the emergence and growth of these progressive alliances is the ability of centrist Democratic officials to pick off the support of these alliances’ constituent organizations by adopting policies that benefit those groups only. Even the strongest such alliance, New York’s Working Families Party, was pressured by many of the unions that have historically supported it to endorse Governor Andrew Cuomo’s re-election bid this spring without even winning Cuomo’s commitment to causes the unions supported. Cuomo had declined to campaign against continuing Republican control of the state Senate, which had bottled up legislation to create public funding of election campaigns and to let cities raise their minimum-wage standards. However, Cuomo had also helped many unions win particular campaigns, and those unions feared his support for their efforts would prove fleeting if the WFP didn’t endorse him forthwith. Only an extraordinary campaign by Working Families Party leaders, who threatened to run a candidate against him, compelled Cuomo to reverse his stance on the state senate and the minimum wage in order to win the party’s backing.

The appeal of transactional politics—in which a group supports a politician in return for his support for their cause, regardless of his positions on other issues—runs deep in America, where larger ideological or class concerns have never loomed as large for Democrats as they have for European social democrats. The appeal of transactional politics grows even stronger when organizations are so embattled they feel required to support anyone who will help them on a particular issue—a situation in which most unions have found themselves in recent decades.

But the leftward movement of the Democratic base has undermined at least some of the foundations of such transactional politics. The Working Families Party was able to pressure Cuomo to reverse field because polling showed that a generic WFP candidate on the November ballot would diminish Cuomo’s support from roughly 60 percent of the electorate to roughly 40 percent. New York’s unusual election laws, which permit third parties either to back major-party candidates or to run candidates of their own, gave the WFP more leverage than kindred alliances may have in other states and cities, but the entire episode (and the polling) demonstrated the depth of support from the Democrats’ new base for policies that advance working-class interests, and the disdain for Democratic pols unwilling to fight for them. Traditional pro-Democratic institutions that continue to play the transactional game may find themselves retarding the growth of a new Democratic electorate demanding the very policies that would most benefit working people’s organizations and prospects.

What might those policies be? While the new urban regimes are enacting a host of progressive ordinances, local governments lack the power to create the kind of economic transformations that the nation’s 99 percent need. Even at the state and federal level, raising the minimum wage, say, directly affects just a fraction of American workers. What else can government do to re-establish the link between economic growth and Americans’ incomes?The single most helpful reform would be to restore workers’ bargaining power. With the rate of unionization in the private sector falling beneath 7 percent, the ability of workers to bargain collectively for improvements in their pay, benefits, or hours is effectively nonexistent. Efforts to shore up their power by strengthening their capacity to form unions without fear of being fired, however, failed during each of the four most recent Democratic presidencies (Johnson’s, Carter’s, Clinton’s, and Obama’s). Progressives cannot abandon this fight, but it’s time to open other fronts as well—particularly since years of polling show stronger support for such labor-backed causes as greater tax equity, higher minimum wages, and restrictions on corporate offshoring than they do for unions themselves.One way to restore the link between the economy’s growth and most Americans’ incomes would be to enlist corporate tax reform in that battle. As WilliamGalston, the onetime leading light of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, has argued, lowering taxes on employers who give their workers a wage increase commensurate with the nation’s annual productivity growth, while raising taxes on employers who don’t, would go some of the way to reconnecting growth to income. The scope of such a reform would increase by requiring employers whom is classify their workers as independent contractors or “temps”—a wage-suppressing dodge that’s long been the norm in such industries as trucking, cab-driving, and warehousing and is now spreading to manufacturing as well—to cease such mislabeling and acknowledge that the workers are in fact their employees. The conventional viewpoint within the economics and business establishments is that workers’ declining incomes are the inevitable result of globalization and the automation of work. This viewpoint neglects to consider how the structure of corporate decision-making affects workers’ experience in the face of these trends. In Germany, laws that require corporations to split their boards between management and worker representatives have led to the preservation of the highest-skilled and-value-added jobs at home—a key reason that country has become an export giant and boasts a far more secure and prosperous working class than ours. A law greatly reducing taxes on corporations that adopt this worker-management balance on their boards, and increasing them on corporations that don’t, could have a profound effect on the way corporations look at such matters as offshoring and the proper division between profits and wages.These proposals would surely encounter massive opposition, but they have the virtue of appealing to Americans’ sense of equity and collegiality, as well as their skepticism about corporate managers, without raising the specter of big government.Democrats must also pursue policies with a more conventional pedigree: investing in public works both because we need to and because it’s impossible to foresee how we get close to full employment or environmental remediation without doing so; steeply raising the tax rates on the top income levels; raising taxes on capital gains and dividends (and perhaps devoting those revenues to a greatly increased Earned Income Tax Credit); regulating finance to the point that it can no longer dominate the economy; and diminishing the responsibility of students and their families for covering the costs of public higher education. But the emphasis on increasing worker power and pay should be central to the Democrats’ concerns, both politically and economically. If the American economy is indeed descending into what economist Larry Summers terms a state of secular stagnation, the low pay of American workers, which has depressed their purchasing power and reduced the profits of all but the highest-end retailers, is largely to blame. Like the other Democratic elected officials of her generation, Hillary Clinton came of age and (more than the others) thrived in an economic and political system in which Kennedy’s rising tide did lift all boats,cohabiting with both Wall Street and working people’s organizations was routine, and the pressure to take a side in a slowly emerging class war could barely be felt. Today, however, that pressure is palpable—and increasingly uncomfortable to a host of Democratic pols, Clinton most especially.  How this conflict affects the 2016 presidential race, the more-likely-than-not Hillary Clinton presidency, and the larger future of the Democratic Party remains to be seen. Despite its demographic advantages, the party cannot indefinitely retain its electoral edge if it fails to address the falling power and income of ordinary Americans—even if such policies cost the party the backing of financial elites at a time when elections are more driven by money than ever before. It’s time for Democrats to disenthrall themselves from their routine conciliation of interests that have become profoundly opposed. It’s time for them to welcome more hatred from the successors to Roosevelt’s forces of selfishness. Harder choices than those Clinton chronicles in her new book await them.

Emphasis Mine

See:

Paul Krugman on the Real Reason Behind the Deficit Panic and the Terrible Damage It Has Wrought

The debt apocalypse has been called off.’

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Source: AlterNet

Author: Paul Krugman

Paul Krugman attacks the recent, years-long panic over the national debt and deficits in today’s column reminding readers that this once relentless topic in the news has pretty much disappeared from view. And for good reason, Krugman says, “The whole thing turns out to have been a false alarm.”

There was a time not so long ago when it was all you could read or hear about. The media and politicians of both stripes kept sounding the alarm over budget deficits and rising debts. Very serious people said the U.S. would soon turn into Greece unless something was done. Obama tried to strike a “Grand Bargain” with Congress for a balanced budget. But, of course, this Congress does not bargain—refuses to raise taxes—and no deal was struck.

Writes Krugman:

I’m not sure whether most readers realize just how thoroughly the great fiscal panic has fizzled — and the deficit scolds are, of course, still scolding. They’re even trying to spin the latest long-term projections from the Congressional Budget Office — which are distinctly non-alarming — as somehow a confirmation of their earlier scare tactics. So this seems like a good time to offer an update on the debt disaster that wasn’t.

About those projections: The budget office predicts that this year’s federal deficit will be just 2.8 percent of G.D.P., down from 9.8 percent in 2009. It’s true that the fact that we’re still running a deficit means federal debt in dollar terms continues to grow — but the economy is growing too, so the budget office expects the crucial ratio of debt to G.D.P. to remain more or less flat for the next decade.

Krugman goes on to responsibly inform readers that things will get more complicated after about a decade as an aging population makes increasing demands on Medicare and Social Security. But, on the plus side, healthcare costs have dramatically slowed down, which none of the doomsday prognosticators saw coming. Krugman writes:

As a result, despite aging, debt in 2039 — a quarter-century from now! — is projected to be no higher, as a percentage of G.D.P., than the debt America had at the end of World War II, or that Britain had for much of the 20th century. Oh, and the budget office now expects interest rates to remain fairly low, not much higher than the economy’s rate of growth. This in turn weakens, indeed almost eliminates, the risk of a debt spiral, in which the cost of servicing debt drives debt even higher.

OK, but still, Krugman allows, rising debt is not good. He also points out that it would take “surprisingly little” to avoid it.

The budget office estimates that stabilizing the ratio of debt to G.D.P. at its current level would require spending cuts and/or tax hikes of 1.2 percent of G.D.P. if we started now, or 1.5 percent of G.D.P. if we waited until 2020. Politically, that would be hard given total Republican opposition to anything a Democratic president might propose, but in economic terms it would be no big deal, and wouldn’t require any fundamental change in our major social programs.

In short, the debt apocalypse has been called off.

So, having cleared up the economics, Krugman turns to the real reasons behind the fiscal panic. It is, as you might have imagined, politically and ideologically motivated. So much so that conservative thinkers like Alan Greenspan have expressed disappointment that the Greece-style crisis never arrived. Even in Europe, the crisis was dealt with rather quickly, in fact, “once the European Central Bank began doing its job, making it clear it would do ‘whatever it takes’ to avoid cash crises in nations that have given up their own currencies and adopted the euro,” Krugman illuminates. “Did you know that Italy, which remains deep in debt and suffers much more from the burden of an aging population than we do, can now borrow long term at an interest rate of only 2.78 percent? Did you know that France, which is the subject of constant negative reporting, pays only 1.57 percent?”
No, that story is not told here. Nor is the simple fact that we do not have a debt crisis. Why is that? Krugman suspects that it has served a political purpose, namely  it suited those powerful conservative interests that want to dismantle Social Security and Medicare. That desire in itself is cruel and irresponsible enough, but these deficit hawks also did a lot of collateral damage along the way, distracting all of us from real problems like unemployment and decaying infractructure and climate change for far too many years.
And who is going to pay for that?

Emphasis Mine

See:http://www.alternet.org/economy/paul-krugman-real-reason-behind-deficit-panic-and-terrible-damage-it-has-wrought?akid=12038.123424.JK4ohx&rd=1&src=newsletter1012195&t=5&paging=off&current_page=1#bookmark