Author: chasdarwin

Active in Americans United, Center For Inquiry, and ACLU

Don’t be fooled by the Newt-Mitt-Rick show

Reagan began this counterrevolution three decades ago. Its aim was to employ the state to shift the balance of political forces to the side of the most reactionary sections of the capitalist class.

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From: Peoples World

By: Sam Webb

Emphasis Mine

“Listening to the exchanges among the main Republican presidential candidates, it is easy to think that the debates are a television “reality show.”

Newt attacks Mitt for his role at the private equity firm Bain Capital. Mitt assails Newt for his ties to Fannie Mae and his dismal performance as speaker of the House in the 1990s. And Rick Santorum when he gets a word in edgewise claims that neither Romney nor Gingrich is the real deal, that is, a true conservative. That tag belongs to him, he says – only he has a franchise on it.

Oops! I almost failed to mention Ron Paul, who is no better than the frontrunners, but he is more of a footnote in the primary contests at this point.

But there is more to these debates than political theater, more than attack and counterattack. What is striking, but goes unnoticed in this clashing free-for-all, is the similarity in basic policy positions of the leading Republican presidential hopefuls.

When it comes to rapid and broad expansion of domestic oil and gas exploration regardless of environmental damage, they are for it.

When it comes to deregulation and discredited “free market solutions,” they want it.

When it comes to broad-scale privatization of education, they support it.

When it comes to tax breaks for the wealthiest, they can’t get enough of it .

When it comes to repeal of Roe v. Wade and with it women’s reproductive rights, they are chomping at the bit to do it.

When it comes to aggressive projection of military power in the Middle East and elsewhere, they strongly advocate it.

When it comes to stacking the courts with right-wing judges, they champion it.

When it comes to the elimination of racial and gender inequality, they want none of it.

When it comes to drastic slashing of the federal budget, they are all for it.

When it comes to immigrant and gay rights, they are against it.

When it comes to overturning the Obama health care act, they salivate over it.

When it comes to disempowering people’s organizations, they are determined to do it.

When it comes to climate change, they deny it.

And when it comes to economic relief … on jobs, foreclosures and food insecurity … they do nothing about it.

In other words, even though they trade charges and counter-charges (usually true), Romney, Gingrich and Santorum (and Ron Paul too with a few variations) are of like mind. They are on the same page.

If any one of them is elected and if the Republicans gain control of Congress, they will set out to complete and consolidate the counterrevolution that Ronald Reagan initiated.

Reagan began this counterrevolution three decades ago. Its aim was to employ the state to shift the balance of political forces to the side of the most reactionary sections of the capitalist class.

Everything that was won by an aroused people over the course of the 20th century was to be eliminated hook, line and sinker. Nothing of the edifice of rights and social gains was to be left standing. The people were to be rendered impoverished as well as defenseless against the monster of a corporate-controlled market and state.

Beneath the discordant sounds of the current Republican Party debates lies a shared vision that would throw the country back to the Gilded Age when corporate elites did as they pleased and the people had no rights that corporate capital had to respect.

Some suggest that there is no difference in vision between President Obama on the one hand and Romney, Gingrich and Santorum on the other. But this is not only wrongheaded, but also politically dangerous.

Only yesterday I read an article by Chris Hedges that goes in that direction.

It sounded militant and righteous, but if taken seriously it’s a fool’s errand and will isolate the left from the broad currents of American politics this year. And nobody who cares about social progress should want to do that.”

see:http://peoplesworld.org/don-t-be-fooled-by-the-newt-mitt-rick-show/

Why Is There So Much God in Our Politics? The Religious Right’s Theocratic Plan for the 2012 Election

“; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” (Article VI, Constitution of the United States.

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From: Church and State magazine, via AlterNet

N.B.: “; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”  (Article VI, Constitution of the United States.

By: Rob Boston

“He’s been married three times and is an admitted adulterer, features that would seem to make Newt Gingrich an unlikely standard-bearer for the hyper-moralistic brigades of the Religious Right. But with a little mental gymnastics, all things are possible.

“Maybe the guy in the race that would make the best president is on his third marriage,” Steve Deace, a prominent Religious Right leader in Iowa, recently mused to writer Michelle Goldberg of “The Daily Beast” website. “How do we reconcile that?”

One way is to do what Deace did and compare Gingrich with King David, the Old Testament figure who committed adultery with another man’s wife but later repented.

“I see a lot of parallels between King David and Newt Gingrich, two extraordinary men gifted by God, whose lives include very high highs and very low lows,” Deace added.

The rise of Gingrich, whose campaign was on life support as recently as the summer, has stunned many political analysts. Once again, they may have underestimated the Religious Right.

In an unusually religion-soaked primary season, faith has been front and center for months, as a crowded field of GOP hopefuls seeks to assure conservative Christians that they’re ready to hoist the banner for faith and family, as the Religious Right defines those terms.

The Almighty has frequently been pressed into service. Addressing a crowd of young Republicans in Atlanta Nov. 12, businessman Herman Cain, who has since suspended his campaign, announced that God told him to run for president.

“I had to do a lot of praying for this one, more praying than I have ever done before in my life,” Cain said. “And when I finally realized that it was God saying that this is what I needed to do, I was like Moses: ‘You have got the wrong man, Lord. Are you sure?’… Once I made the decision, I did not look back.”

But there was a problem: Cain was the fourth Republican candidate to claim God’s blessing. The deity also convinced U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) to run and gave a green light to Texas Gov. Rick Perry. For good measure, God assured Karen Santorum, wife of former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, that her husband should also be in the race.

God, it is said, works in mysterious ways. Those who claim to serve God – or, in this case, the Religious Right – usually work in more predictable ways. And this campaign season has seen the Religious Right playing its appointed role: purging the Republican Party of moderates and working to keep the candidates as closely aligned with its theocratic vision as possible.

It would be easy to argue that the Religious Right is seeking to dominate the GOP race – and is doing a pretty good job of it. For months, political pundits ensconced in Washington, D.C., insisted that the race was really no race at all. Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney would be the nominee, they declared.

Just one problem: Republican voters hadn’t signed off on that deal. As summer blended into fall, poll watchers noted with interest that Romney rarely cracked 25 percent support in any national poll. Furthermore, other candidates were constantly nipping at his heels and sometimes overtaking him.

In late summer, Perry briefly topped Romney in national polls before self-destructing due to a string of debate gaffes. Cain then took the lead, before he tumbled over allegations of sexual harassment and infidelity and announced on Dec. 3 that he was suspending his campaign. By that point, Gingrich, the former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, had leaped ahead.

It didn’t take a CNN political analyst to figure out what was going on: Romney’s support just wasn’t that deep, and the candidate hadn’t generated much genuine enthusiasm. Among Religious Right voters especially, the Mormon who served one term as governor of a bluer-than-blue state was looking like a crap shoot. Some Religious Right activists signed onto Romney’s campaign seeing him as the most likely person to depose President Barack Obama, whom they despise. But plenty of others continued to press for a purer candidate.

For their part, most of the GOP contenders worked hard to win Religious Right support. In October, every major hopeful spoke at the Values Voter Summit, an annual confab held by the Family Research Council, the American Family Association and other groups. (See “Bombast, Bigotry and the Bible,” November 2011 Church & State.)

On Nov. 19, the Religious Right significantly upped the ante. Three groups – the Iowa-based Family Leader, the National Organization for Marriage and CitizenLink (the overtly political arm of Focus on the Family) – sponsored a forum on “values” issues at First Federated Church in Des Moines.

For more than two hours, six candidates focused on Religious Right concerns: abortion, same-sex marriage, the role of religion in public life and so on. The moderator, Republican pollster Frank Luntz, also gave each candidate a chance to explain his or her Christian faith and tell personal stories about times when they’ve had to rely on God.

Romney, perhaps having no desire to spend two hours explaining Mormon theology to a crowd of fundamentalist Christians, skipped the event. But the other attendees were eager for the chance to assure Religious Right voters of their solidarity. Highlights included Gingrich’s assertion that no atheist is fit to be president and several candidates’ tearful retellings of medical emergencies they faced.

Aside from the forum, Religious Right forces are active across the country but especially in Iowa, where the movement’s foot soldiers have a headlock on the state Republican Party apparatus. In many other politically critical states, Religious Right groups are moving aggressively to implement “get-out-the-vote” programs to increase turnout by far-right church-goers.

Former Christian Coalition head Ralph Reed, having failed as a political consultant and a novelist, has gone back to his roots and is now running the Faith & Freedom Coalition. Backed by right-wing fat cats, Reed has vowed to contact 29 million religious conservative and Tea Party voters in 2012. While notorious for exaggerating, Reed’s operation is being lauded as the bridge between Religious Right voters and the anti-government Tea Party brigades.

Some new faces are also on the scene. The Response, a Pentecostal-themed movement that gave a boost to Perry by holding a massive Houston prayer rally shortly before he announced, is striving to go nationwide. The group, which has a distinctly theocratic dominionist character, held a prayer event in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, shortly before the Iowa caucuses. Although pitched as a call for national revival, the rally’s close proximity to the nation’s first voting event of 2012 raised eyebrows.

In addition, a group of wealthy venture capitalists in northern California is bankrolling United in Purpose, a group that vows to register five million far-right Christians for the 2012 election. Like Reed, the Silicon Valley-funded group pins its hopes on a sophisticated voter ID program that claims to track people by how they’ve voted in the past and by their magazine subscriptions and even the purchases they’ve made online.

United in Purpose has been flogging a video called “One Nation Under God,” which it is urging supporters to show at local events. The video features “Christian nation” advocate David Barton, Focus on the Family founder James C. Dobson and anti-abortion activist Lila Rose, but the only candidate it gives air time to is Gingrich.

The group also plans to target conservative pastors.

“They’re the shepherds of the flock,” Bill Dallas, the group’s head, told the Los Angeles Times. “It’s a great mass media channel.”

Indeed, pastors who lead fundamentalist flocks are under quite a bit of scrutiny this election season. Outfits like the Family Research Council and the Faith & Freedom Coalition will be targeting pastors for political action, urging them to exhort congregants on their Christian duty to vote. Pastors will also be asked to distribute biased “voter guides” produced by groups like the Faith & Freedom Coalition that purport to objectively compare candidates’ views but in reality always portray the GOP office-seeker favorably.

Some organizations are going beyond that. For several years now, the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), a Religious Right legal group founded by TV and radio preachers, has been prodding pastors to openly defy federal law by endorsing or opposing candidates from the pulpit. Every fall, the ADF sponsors “Pulpit Freedom Sunday,” a day during which pastors are urged to intervene in elections.

The ADF, a $35-million-a-year operation based in Scottsdale, Ariz., claims that more than 500 pastors took part in the project in 2011, and the group is aiming for even more in 2012, when “Pulpit Freedom Sunday” will take place on Oct. 7.

What does all of this Religious Right involvement mean for American politics? Although many Americans may not realize it, the theocratic right has had a profound effect on the political system and has helped reshape the American political landscape.

More than 30 years ago, when the modern version of the Religious Right was launched, the Rev. Jerry Falwell and other leaders talked openly about taking over the Republican Party. They soon began doing it. During the heyday of TV preacher Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition, political analysts used to track the growth of the Religious Right in the states, noting that its shock troops held a controlling interest in many state GOP branches.

Now firmly entrenched in the party apparatus, Religious Right operatives have become a force that cannot be ignored. Republican hopefuls on the national stage bypass this movement at their peril. (It’s no coincidence that one former GOP presidential candidate who refused to continually kowtow to the Religious Right, former Utah governor Jon Huntsman, was mired in the single digits before quitting the race.)

At the national level, the Religious Right has helped push the GOP much farther to the right, acting as a screen that filters out moderates.

Thanks largely to the Religious Right, liberal Republicans are an all- but-extinct species. Even moderates are becoming scarce in the party. While this wasn’t all the Religious Right’s doing, the movement certainly played a key role through its constant promotion of “culture war” issues.

This year, Religious Right groups had hoped to coalesce early behind a single candidate and propel him or her to the nomination. For a number of reasons, it didn’t work out. Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, a favorite of the Religious Right, decided to sit out the race. Some candidates, notably Bachmann when she was in the race and Santorum, aggressively wooed the Religious Right by putting culture war issues at the crux of their campaign but are perceived as unlikely to prevail over Obama.

U.S. Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) actually has a fairly strong record in support of Religious Right issues but his libertarian focus on shrinking the size of the federal government and anti-war stance hurt him with fundamentalists.

That left Romney by default – until Gingrich began to rise. But the former speaker has yet to seal the deal, and some in the Religious Right remain skeptical.

In late November, Gingrich got some unsolicited advice from Richard Land, a lobbyist with the Southern Baptist Convention. Land warned Gingrich, a convert to Roman Catholicism, that evangelical women are concerned over his matrimonial track record.

“You need to make it as clear as you possibly can that you deeply regret your past actions and that you do understand the anguish and suffering they caused others including your former spouses,” wrote Land in an open letter to Gingrich. “Make it as clear as you can that you have apologized for the hurt your actions caused and that you have learned from your past misdeeds.

Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, also believes Gingrich has some work to do. Gingrich has been on a tear attacking “secular socialism” for months and blasting courts for upholding church-state separation – he has even proposed impeaching certain federal judges – but Perkins told Fox News that the former speaker needs to stress social issues even more so religious conservatives will realize he’s sincere.

Ironically, the internal divisions among the Religious Right may do exactly what they don’t want: provide a boost to Obama. In the lead-up to the 2008 election, followers of the Religious Right splintered over the flock of GOP candidates. U.S. Sen. John McCain captured the nomination but failed to generate significant enthusiasm among the far right. Obama’s team, meanwhile, did aggressive outreach to religious groups and even managed to peel off some evangelical support.

Obama is employing the same strategy again. In October, Obama met with top leaders of the National Association of Evangelicals at the White House. He has also met with leaders of the Roman Catholic Church, a key constituency whose membership includes a lot of swing voters.

In late November, Democratic leaders held a press conference in Washington, during which they vowed to aggressively reach out to religious groups and voters.

The Daily Caller, a conservative website, reported that U.S. Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.), who heads up religious outreach for the party, said, “As we organize going forward to next year there will be significant efforts on our part to reconnect the fundamentals of our policies to the teachings that we all learned, be it in the Old Testament or the New Testament.”

Clyburn added that in the past, Democrats “were so strong in our doctrine that there ought to be a separation of church and state, that we often took it to an extreme, and I think that’s how we got disconnected [from voters].”

Americans United Executive Director Barry W. Lynn said he regrets the Religious Right’s influence over the presidential campaign and U.S. political life. The culture war obsessions of the Religious Right, Lynn said, don’t reflect the concerns of most Americans.

“Our nation faces many serious problems, but a lack of religion in our political system isn’t one of them,” remarked Lynn. “In fact, this election has already become deeply entangled with religion, with four candidates now claiming that God told them to run. Enough is enough.”

Rob Boston is the assistant director of communications for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which publishes Church and State magazine.

Emphasis Mine

see:http://www.alternet.org/story/153685/why_is_there_so_much_god_in_our_politics_the_religious_right%27s_theocratic_plan_for_the_2012_election?akid=8157.123424.Pq9QR6&rd=1&t=12

The Essentials for the Necessary Transition to a Renewable Energy Economy

It is exactly because the energy, military, and financial elites will benefit from fossil fuel scarcity that progressives need to tackle the problem head on. In rebuilding the infrastructure, the economic fortunes of the 99 percent can be revived as well

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From: alternet

By: Jon Ryan

“Fossil fuels are going to disappear, whether we like it or not. Petroleum, natural gas, and coal are becoming scarcer, harder to extract and a greater danger to the global climate. If we proceed with business-as-usual, energy companies will take advantage of increasing scarcity to dominate the world economy by vacuuming up more money from the 99%. They will be able to ally with military and financial institutions to construct an energy-military-financial complex that could eventually reduce most of the rest of us to a form of debt peonage. On the other hand, if we could possibly elect a government that does what governments do best – build infrastructure – we can avoid a world of global warming and economic collapse by building enough wind farms, solar panels, and geothermal systems to power our economy and ignite a sustainable, broad-based period of economic growth. Of course, this will require a sea-change in the direction of the political system, along the lines of the Occupy movement, but there is too much at stake to throw up our hands in despair.

The unfolding energy drama presents progressives with several dilemmas. Some are suspicious that oil scarcity can be used as a ruse by the oil companies and speculators to spike prices. Roger Altman recentlyargued that a larger supply of fossil fuels will lead to less international tension. More generally, progressives sometimes fear that advocating for less oil use will be seen by the public as an attack on the American Dream of a car in every garage and a single family home for every family.

But in addition to problems of scarcity and extraction, fossil fuels are bringing us towards extremely dangerous climate change. We need to have some answers or else the Right will simply keep up with the chant of “Drill baby drill.” It’s time to counter with, “Build, build, build!”

Dirty fuels Create an Unsustainable economy

The question of the future of the supply of fossil fuels is not an easy one to answer. Oil producing nations, for instance, are not at all transparent about their supplies. Technologies constantly change, and so do environmental hazards. However, if we look at the current state of fossil fuel industries, it should be clear that we are in trouble.

1) Natural gas. Natural gas production is being kept alive by the development of hyrdrofracturing technology, or “fracking.” As AlterNet has reported, an official with New York State stated that frackingwill contaminate water supplies. His is only the most recent statement of a widespread concern about the dangers of this new practice. France has temporarily banned fracking, and New York State is considering how to proceed, but one would hope that the possibility of making New York City uninhabitable because of contaminated water would focus minds considerably.

Beyond environmental concerns, the corporate hype surrounding fracking as a “game changer” is false. Even the Energy Information Administration, generally a cheerleader for the industry, predicts that with fracking American natural gas production will increase by only 31 per cent by 2035. That increase probably won’t even cover growth of the economy, and even so there is talk of exporting natural gas, which will decrease the amount available for domestic use even further. The problem is one that is endemic to the current fossil fuel industry – the conventional methods of extraction are leading toprecipitous drops in production as fields are sucked dry, so extreme extraction is the only route left.

2) Oil. The environmental situation is at least as bad in the case of petroleum production, as we saw in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. Despite industry trumpeting of new technological breakthroughs, the underlying fact is this: oil companies would not be oil-fracking, drilling multi-mile pipes underwater, exploring the Arctic and cooking tar sands if they could do what they did for the first 100 years of the oil age — drill into pressurized deposits of oil that are conveniently situated below solid, dry, accessible land. The energy gained compared to the energy needed to discover oil has collapsed from 1200 to 5 in the last 100 years. By contrast, wind energy now returns 25 times the energy needed to provide it.

Despite all of the new oil extraction techniques, global production of petroleum has stagnated since about 2005. This plateau in production is referred to as “peak oil” by activists who are concerned about how a civilization that requires oil for its transportation needs will survive if the supply should start to shrink precipitously. As scarcity leads to higher gasoline prices, economies stop growing, which leads to less demand for gasoline and then, temporarily, lower prices, until demand lifts the price again, and the cycle repeats itself.

Meanwhile, in a desperate attempt to stave off the inevitable, societies encourage dirtier and dirtier methods of extraction. Nigeria, a major oil exporter, illustrates this irony. The problem of peak oil is exacerbated by the decrease in exportable production, because big exporters like Nigeria and Saudi Arabia keep using more oil for their own use. When the Nigerian government tried to eliminate gasoline subsidies, riots ensued, a process that has repeated itself throughout the oil-producing nations, thus decreasing the amount of oil available for oil importers. This rioting occurred at the same time that Nigeria’s oil rich delta experienced a terrible oil spill, an area that endures an Exxon-Valdez-sized spill every year.

The Canadian tar sands may be the worst of all fossil fuel disasters, not only because thousands of miles of forest and large deposits of water are destroyed, but because the extra carbon emitted from these formations may mean “game over” for the climate, to use eminent climatologist James Hansen’s phrase. The reason Hansen is so worried about the tar sands is because his scenario for avoiding the worst of global warming is to stop using coal, but only if oil production peaks and declines, as peak oil activistspredict. If more, dirtier oil flows, then you could shut down all the coal plants and the biosphere would still be in big trouble.

3) Coal. Coal use, at least in the U.S., is indeed declining , although not fast enough – and it is stillincreasing rapidly in China.  But even coal is experiencing supply problems, as China has to import 40 percent of its supplies. The data on coal is even less reliable than the data for petroleum, but some experts have predicted a peak in production as early as 2020. Meanwhile, coal, like oil and increasingly natural gas, continues to wreak death and destruction on its environment.

4) Nukes and biofuels. Uranium is not a fossil fuel, but it is a fuel, as are biofuels, which also have very negative consequences for the environment. Fukushima may have begun to sound a death knell of the nuclear power industry. Even the French nuclear industry, which generates 80% of France’s electricity, has had to lay off employees because contracts to build nuclear power plants have been cancelled. It is becoming clear that biofuels usually cause more damage than benefits, by replacing food production, encouraging deforestation, and increasing pollution. The challenge for humanity is to stop using fuels and to only use renewable sources of energy from the sun, wind, and earth.

Transitioning to a renewable energy society

For progressives, the fossil fuel crisis provides a great opportunity for equitable, sustainable economic growth. Since energy impacts all sections of society, all parts of the economy must become more just in order to solve the problem. Nowhere is this more evident than in the case of petroleum. While it would be much easier if Sammy and Susie Suburban could wake up in the future and drive their electric cars in just the same way they drive their oil-powered ones, this scenario seems very unlikely.

The best way to reduce and eliminate the use of petroleum is to increase the density of town, suburban, and city centers, so that people can choose to walk, bike, or take electric trains such as subways and light rail, and so that slow, low-range actually-existing electric vehicles can cover the shorter distances needed. To make dense city centers attractive, however, a good educational system is required. As the current candidate for Senate in Massachussets, Elizabeth Warren, has argued, much of the expansion of the suburbs and the increased expenditure of family income has occurred in order to live in a good school district. Thus, because of the interconnected nature of the modern economy, it might turn out that the single most important way to solve the energy crisis is to improve urban schools!

The technology now exists to supply all the electricity we need by constructing wind farms, solar panels, and energy-efficient buildings. If progressives want to argue for the positive benefits of government, then they can advocate for a multi-trillion dollar program of government-led new energy infrastructure, which would employ tens of millions of people and rebuild the key to our economic prosperity, our manufacturing base.

It is exactly because the energy, military, and financial elites will benefit from fossil fuel scarcity that progressives need to tackle the problem head on. In rebuilding the infrastructure, the economic fortunes of the 99 percent can be revived as well.”

Jon Rynn is the author of the book Manufacturing Green Prosperity: The power to rebuild the American middle class, available from Praeger Press. He holds a Ph.D. in political science and is a Visiting Scholar at the CUNY Institute for Urban Systems. In the spring he will be participating in a global teach-in (globalteachin.com), incorporating these and other issues.


Emphasis Mine

see:http://www.alternet.org/story/153704/the_essentials_for_the_necessary_transition_to_a_renewable_energy_economy?akid=8133.123424.O7Hu5D&rd=1&t=12

The Top 5 Tax Myths To Watch Out For This Election Season

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From:Originally found on Citizens for Tax Justice. Submitted by volunteer editor Mark H

MYTH #1: 47% of Americans do not pay taxes.

Fact: All Americans pay taxes.


MYTH #2: The American people and corporations pay high taxes.

Fact: The US has the third lowest taxes of any developed country in the world.


MYTH #3: Cutting taxes creates jobs and raises revenue.

Fact: Tax cuts reduce revenue and are not associated with economic growth.


MYTH #4: The US tax system is very progressive because wealthy individuals already pay a disproportionate amount of taxes.

Fact: At a time of growing income inequality, the US tax system is basically flat.

When you take into account all of the taxes that individuals pay, the truth is that our tax system is relatively flat. The top one percent of income earners receives 20.3 percent of total income while paying 21.5 percent of total taxes and the lowest 20 percent of income earners receive 3.5 percent of total income while still paying out two percent of total taxes.

In other words, wealthy individuals pay a high percentage of taxes because they earn a highly disproportionate amount of income. This is a consequence of growing income inequality in the United States, which is at a level not seen since before the Great Depression.


MYTH #5: The “Fair Tax” or a flat tax would be more fair.

Fact: The “Fair Tax” or a flat tax would make our tax system even more regressive.

Emphasis Mine

see:http://front.moveon.org/the-top-5-tax-myths-to-watch-out-for-this-election-season/#.TwpLobhkOjY.facebook

No longer the land of opportunity

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From: Washington Post

By: Harold Meyerson.

““Over the past three years, Barack Obama has been replacing our merit-based society with an Entitlement Society,” Mitt Romney wrote in USA Today last month. The coming election, Romney told Wall Street Journal editors last month, will be “a very simple choice” between Obama’s “European social democratic” vision and “a merit-based opportunity society — an American-style society — where people earn their rewards based on their education, their work, their willingness to take risks and their dreams.”

Romney’s assertions are the centerpiece of his, and his party’s, critique not just of Obama but of American liberalism generally. But they fail to explain how and why the American economy has declined the past few decades — in good part because they betray no awareness that Europe’s social democracies now fit the description of “merit-based opportunity societies” much more than ours does.

The best way to measure a nation’s merit-based status is to look at its intergenerational economic mobility: Do children move up and down the economic ladder based on their own abilities, or does their economic standing simply replicate their parents’? Sadly, as the American middle class has thinned out over recent decades, the idea of America as the land of opportunity has become a farce. As a paper by Julia Isaacs of the Brookings Institution has shown, sons’ earnings approximate those of their fathers about three times more frequently in the United States than they do in Denmark, Norway and Finland, and about 11 / 2 times more frequently than they do in Germany. The European social democracies — where taxes, entitlements and the rate of unionization greatly exceed America’s — are demonstrably more merit-based than the United States.

That’s hardly the only measure by which Europe’s social democracies demonstrate more dynamism than our increasingly sclerotic plutocracy. Unemployment rates in Northern European nations — as of October, Germany’s unemployment rate was 6.5 percent; the Netherlands, 4.8 percent; Sweden 7.4 percent — are substantially lower than ours (9 percent then). Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Germany in particular have sizable trade surpluses, while the United States runs the largest trade deficits in human history.

There are, of course, a multitude of reasons the nations of Northern Europe are outperforming us. But if entitlements and social democracy were anywhere near the impediments to enterprise that Romney claims, Germany would hardly be the most successful economy in the advanced industrial world, with those of Scandinavia close behind.

The secrets of social democracy’s successes are in plain view. In Scandinavia, government commitment to worker retraining and job relocation mean that there is no major political pressure to keep failing firms in business; it’s a policy that favors innovative start-ups. In Germany, management and unions cooperate to upgrade their products and their processes — partly because corporate boards consist of equal numbers of management and worker representatives. Germany’s surge in exports may be partly attributable to its union workers agreeing to hold their wages flat (at levels still well above those of their U.S. counterparts). But their workers’ willingness to sacrifice in order to stay competitive is surely increased by the fact that their CEOs on average make just 11 times as much as their workers. In the United States, chief executives make roughly 200 to 300 times (choose your survey) as much as their average employees’ salary.

Which brings us back to Romney’s characterization of our country as a merit-based society and his failure to notice the huge changes in economic rewards over the past three decades. During the 30 years after World War II, the average American family’s income doubled, while chief executives’ income was restrained, increasing by less than 1 percent annually, according to a 2010 paper by economists Carola Frydman and Raven Saks. Beginning around 1980, however, as unions were smashed, industry moved offshore and executive pay skyrocketed, the incomes of most Americans began to flatten or decline, while financiers and corporate leaders were able to claim more and more of the nation’s income for themselves.

Corporate leaders have been rewarded with huge payouts even when their corporation’s performance has been disappointing. Conversely, millions of Americans have maintained or upgraded their skills yet seen their jobs shipped abroad or downgraded. Is this a description of a merit-based society? How does it compare with that of mid-century America, when the rewards for work were distributed more broadly?

Romney and his Bain Capital buddies may view their wealth as the just rewards endemic to successful people in a merit-based society. But why are so few Americans sharing in those rewards today while so many Americans shared in them 40 years ago? Are most Americans no longer meritorious? Or has our country ceased to reward any but the rich and powerful?

meyersonh@washpost.com

Emphasis Mine

see:http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/no-longer-the-land-of-opportunity/2012/01/02/gIQAOJVDZP_story.html?wpisrc=nl_opinions

The Spectre of 1932: Will Fascism Rise Again in 2012?

The lesson of history is that tough times often reward the desperate and dangerous, from angry demagogues to anarchists and nationalists, from seething mobs to expansionist empires.

chasdarwin1 Comment

From:Daily Mail UK

By:Dominic Sandbrook

N.B.: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”  (George Santayana)

“The dawn of a new year is usually a time of hope and ambition,of dreams for the future and thoughts of a better life. But it is a long time since many of us looked forward to the new year with such anxiety, even dread.

Here in Britain, many economists believe that by the end of 2012 we could well have slipped into a second devastating recession. The Coalition remains delicately poised; it would take only one or two resignations to provoke a wider schism and a general election.

But the real dangers lie overseas. In the Middle East, the excitement of the Arab Spring has long since curdled into sectarian tension and fears of Islamic fundamentalism. And with so many of the world’s oil supplies concentrated in the Persian Gulf, British families will be keeping an anxious eye on events in the Arab world.

Meanwhile, as the eurozone slides towards disaster, the prospects for Europe have rarely been bleaker. Already the European elite have installed compliant technocratic governments in Greece and Italy, and with the markets now putting pressure on France, few observers can be optimistic that the Continent can avoid a total meltdown.

As commentators often remark, the world picture has not been grimmer since the dark days of the mid-Seventies, when the OPEC oil shock, the rise of stagflation and the surge of nationalist terrorism cast a heavy shadow over the Western world.

For the most chilling parallel, though, we should look back exactly 80 years, to the cold wintry days when 1931 gave way to 1932.

Then as now, few people saw much to mourn in the passing of the old year. It was in 1931 that the Great Depression really took hold in Europe, bringing governments to their knees and plunging tens of millions of people out of work.

Then as now, the crisis had taken years to gather momentum. After the Wall Street Crash in 1929 – just as after the banking crisis of 2008 – some observers even thought that the worst was over.

But in the summer of 1931, a wave of banking panics swept across central Europe. As the German and Austrian financial houses tottered, Britain’s Labour government came under fierce market pressure to slash spending and cut benefits.

Bitterly divided, the Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald decided to resign from office – only to return immediately as the leader of an all-party Coalition known as the National Government, dominated by Stanley Baldwin’s Conservatives.

Like today’s Coalition, the National Government was an uneasy marriage. Sunk in self-pity and spending much of his time flirting with aristocratic hostesses, MacDonald cut a miserable and semi-detached figure. By comparison, even Nick Clegg looks a model of strong, decisive leadership.

As for the Tory leader Stanley Baldwin, he had more in common with David Cameron than we might think. A laid-back Old Harrovian, tolerant, liberal-minded and ostentatiously relaxed, Baldwin spent as much time as possible on holiday in the South of France, preferring to enjoy the Mediterranean sunshine rather than get his hands dirty with the nuts and bolts of policy.

Meanwhile, far from offering a strong and coherent Opposition, the rump Labour Party seemed doomed to irrelevance. At least its leader, the pacifist Arthur Henderson, could claim to be a man of the people, having hauled himself up by his bootstraps from his early days as a Newcastle metal worker.

Not even his greatest admirers could possibly say the same of today’s adenoidal, stammering Opposition leader, the toothless Ed Miliband.

With the politicians apparently impotent in the face of the economic blizzard, many people were losing faith in parliamentary democracy. Their despair was hardly surprising: in some industrial towns of the North, Wales and Scotland, unemployment in 1932 reached a staggering 70 per cent.

With thousands more being plunged out of work every week, even the National Government estimated that one in four people were making do on a mere subsistence diet. Scurvy, rickets and tuberculosis were rife; in the slag heaps of Wigan, George Orwell saw ‘several hundred women’ scrabbling ‘in the mud for hours’, searching for tiny chips of coal so they could heat their homes.

Feeling betrayed by mainstream politicians, many sought more extreme alternatives. Then as now, Britain was rocked by marches and demonstrations. In October 1932, a National Hunger March in Hyde Park saw bloody clashes between protesters and mounted policemen, with 75 people being badly injured.

And while Left-wing intellectuals were drawn to the supposedly utopian promise of the Soviet leader Josef Stalin – who turned out to be a brutal tyrant – thousands of ordinary people flocked to the banners of the British Union of Fascists, founded in the autumn of 1932 by the former Labour maverick Sir Oswald Mosley.

Never before or since has the far Right commanded greater British support – a worrying reminder of the potential for economic frustration to turn into demagogic resentment.

But the most compelling parallels between 1932 and 2012 lie overseas, where the economic and political situation was, if anything, even darker.

Eighty years ago, the world was struggling to come to terms with an entirely new financial landscape. In August 1931, the system by which currencies were pegged to the value of gold had fallen apart, with market pressure forcing Britain to pull the pound off the gold standard.

Almost overnight, the system that was supposed to ensure global economic stability was gone. And as international efforts to coordinate a response collapsed, so nations across the world fell back on self-interested economic protectionism.

In August 1932, the British colonies and dominions met in the Canadian capital, Ottawa, and agreed a policy of Imperial Preference, putting high tariffs on goods from outside the Empire. International free trade was now a thing of the past; in this frightening new world, it was every man for himself.

Today’s situation, of course, is even more frightening. Our equivalent of the gold standard – the misguided folly of the euro – is poised on the brink of disaster, yet the European elite refuse to let poorer Mediterranean nations like Greece and Portugal leave the eurozone, devalue their new currencies and start again.

Should the eurozone collapse, as seems perfectly likely given Greece’s soaring debts, Spain’s record unemployment, Italy’s non-existent growth and the growing market pressure on France’s ailing economy, then the consequences would be much worse than when Britain left the gold standard.

The shockwaves across Europe – which could come as early as next spring – would see banks tottering, businesses crashing and millions thrown out of work. For British firms that trade with Europe, as well as holiday companies, airports, travel firms and the City of London itself, the meltdown of the eurozone would be a catastrophe.

And as the experience of 80 years ago suggests, the political and social ramifications would be too terrible to contemplate. For in many ways, the 12 months between the end of 1931 and the beginning of 1933 were the tipping point between democracy and tyranny, the moment when the world plunged from an uneasy peace towards hatred and bloodshed.

In the East, new powers were already on the rise. At the end of 1931, Imperial Japan had already launched a staggeringly brutal invasion of China, the Japanese armies pouring into the disputed province of Manchuria in search of raw materials.

Today the boot is on the other foot, with China ploughing billions into its defence programme and establishing de facto economic colonies across Africa, bringing copper, cobalt and zinc back to the mother country.

Indeed, future historians may well look back and see the first years of the 2010s as the moment when the Chinese Empire began to strengthen its global grip.

In the Soviet Union in 1932, meanwhile, Stalin’s reign of terror was intensifying. With dissent crushed by the all-powerful Communist Party, his state-sponsored collectivisation of the Ukrainian farms saw a staggering 6million die in one of the worst famines in history.

By these standards, the autocratic Vladimir Putin looks almost cuddly.

And yet we should not forget that Putin himself described the fall of the Soviet empire as one of the greatest catastrophes of the century – and that half of all Russian teenagers recently told a survey that Stalin was a wise and strong leader.

By comparison, Europe’s democratic leaders look woolly and vacillating, just as they did back in 1932. Indeed, for the democratic West, this was a truly terrible year.

Democracy itself seemed to be under siege. In France, President Paul Doumer was murdered by an assassin. In Portugal, the authoritarian, ultra-Catholic dictator Antonio Salazar launched a reign of terror that would last into the Seventies. And in Italy, the Fascist leader Benito Mussolini strengthened his grip, consolidating Italian power in the looted colonies of Albania and Libya.

Eighty years on, we have no room for complacency. Although the far Right remains no more than a thuggish and eccentric minority, the elected prime ministers of Greece and Italy have already been booted out to make way for EU-approved technocrats for whom nobody has ever voted.

In the new Europe, the will of the people seems to play second fiddle to the demands of Paris and Berlin. And if the eurozone crisis intensifies, then it is no idle fantasy to imagine that Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy and their Brussels allies will demand an even greater centralisation of powers, provoking nationalist outrage on the streets of Europe’s capitals.

Sadly, there seems little point in looking across the Atlantic for inspiration. In 1932, President Herbert Hoover, beleaguered by rising unemployment and tumbling ratings, flailed and floundered towards election defeat.

Today, Barack Obama cuts a similarly impotent, indecisive and isolationist figure. The difference is that in 1932, one of the greatest statesmen of the century, the Democratic politician Franklin D. Roosevelt, was waiting in the wings.

Today, American voters looking for alternatives are confronted only with a bizarre gaggle of has-beens, inadequates and weirdos, otherwise known as the Republican presidential field. And to anybody who cares about the future of the Western world, the prospect of President Ron Paul or President Newt Gingrich is frankly spine-chilling.

Above all, though, the eyes of the world back in 1932 were fixed on Germany. As the Weimar Republic staggered towards oblivion, an obscure Austrian painter was setting his sights on supreme power.

With rising unemployment eating away at the bonds of democratic civility, the National Socialist Party was within touching distance of government.

And in the last days of 1932, after the technocrats and generals had failed to restore order, President Paul von Hindenburg began to contemplate the unthinkable – the prospect of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany.

We all know what happened next. Indeed, by the end of 1932 the world was about to slide towards a new dark age, an age of barbarism and bloodshed on a scale that history had never known.

Eighty years on, it would be easy to sit back and reassure ourselves that the worst could never happen again. But that, of course, was what people told each other in 1932, too.

The lesson of history is that tough times often reward the desperate and dangerous, from angry demagogues to anarchists and nationalists, from seething mobs to expansionist empires.

Our world is poised on the edge of perhaps the most important 12 months for more than half a century. If our leaders provide the right leadership, then we may, perhaps, muddle through towards slow growth and gradual recovery.

But if the European elite continue to inflict needless hardship on their people; if the markets continue to erode faith in the euro; and if Western politicians waste their time in petty bickering, then we could easily slip further towards discontent and disaster.

The experience of 1932 provides a desperately valuable lesson. As a result of the decisions taken in those 12 short months, millions of people later lost their lives.

Today, on the brink of a new year that could well prove the most frightening in living memory, we can only pray that our history takes a very different path.”

N.B.: Action, not prayer, please…

Emphasis Mine

see:http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/9204-the-spectre-of-1932-will-fascism-rise-again-in-2012

2011 in review

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The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 2,300 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 38 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Understanding Social Security

chasdarwin1 Comment

From:AlterNet, co -sourced from Campaing for America‘s future.

N.B.: It is not my intention  pick on the Post – which should know better: misunderstanding is wide spread.

By:Dave Johnson

“See if you can spot the big mistake (giving them the benefit of the doubt) in this Washington Post story: Payroll tax cut raises worries about Social Security’s future funding:

This year, the Social Security system projects that it will pay out $46 billion more in benefits than it will collect in cash. It made up for the shortfall by redeeming Treasury bonds bought in years when there were cash surpluses.

Here is the mistake, thanks to Dean Baker: Social Security Is NOT Selling Government Bonds,

This is not true. The Social Security trust fund is projected to earn $114.9 billion in interest on the bonds it holds. It will use a portion of these earnings to pay current benefits. It will not be redeeming its bonds.

Social Security has a huge trust fund — if you think $2.6 trillion is huge. That trust fund is invested in US Treasury Bonds, and earns interest.

When you hear that Social Security is “in trouble’ or “going broke” you are hearing from people who ignore this huge, huge trust fund and the interest it earns. This trust fund, along with the money people pay in, means that Social Security has enough to pay full benefits until 2037. Even then it will still be able to pay everyone more than they receive today. (Yes, more, because of cost-of-living adjustments.)

One of the problems with Social Security is that the “cap” –– the top income that is taxed to pay into the fund — was calculated in the 80’s, and they didn’t foresee that all income gains after the 80s would only go to those at the top, where the income isn’t taxed to pay into the fund. So, since the 80s, as more and more of the income gains went to the top few, the Social Security fund started to not have quite enough to go on forever. So now it it projected to only last until 2037. This is, of course, easily fixed — as are so many of our country’s problems — by asking those at the top to pay in a little more.

So … will I be attacked with pepper spray and batons for suggesting that the rich should pay back a bit more?”

Emphasis Mine

see:

How Right-Wing Conspiracy Theories May Pose a Genuine Threat to Humanity

Tea Partiers, freaking out about “Agenda 21” and convinced global warming isn’t real, are gumming up the works for those trying to save the planet.

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From: AlterNet

N.B.: Perhaps what we need at the polls is not voter id but a basic science literacy test.

By: Joshua Holland

“The paranoia infecting a broad swath of the American right-wing can be comical at times — think about Orly Taitz and her fellow Birthers. But we laugh at our own peril, because what Richard Hofstadter famously characterized as “the paranoid style in American politics” poses a serious threat to our future: the right’s snowballing conspiracy theories could ultimately lead to disaster.

Consider what’s happening in Virginia‘s Middle Peninsula on the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay, among the areas in the U.S. most vulnerable to climate change. Earlier this month, Darryl Fears, reporting for the Washington Post, offered a glimpse into the madness that city planners have faced in recent months as a local Tea Party group, convinced that a nefarious plot by scientists and city officials is afoot, have disrupted their work trying to mitigate the potential impacts of rising sea levels.

“The uprising,” wrote Fears, “began at a February meeting about starting a business park for farming oysters in Mathews County.” He continued:

The program to help restore the Chesapeake Bay oyster population was slated for land owned by the county, but it was shouted down as a useless federal program that would expand the national debt. The proposal was tabled.

As the opposition grew over the summer, confrontations became so heated that some planners posted uniformed police officers at meetings and others hired consultants to help calm audiences and manage the indoor environment, several planners said.

In James City County, speakers were shouted away from a podium. In Page County, angry farmers forced commissioners to stop a meeting. In Gloucester County, planners sat stone-faced as activists took turns reading portions of the 500-page Agenda 21 text, delaying a meeting for more than an hour.

“Agenda 21” is one of a number of silly but dangerous conspiracy theories sweeping through the fever swamps of the right. Although admittedly sinister-sounding, Agenda 21 is just a blueprint for sustainable development, especially in emerging economies. It outlines how wealthier countries can contribute to smarter growth through technology transfers and public education. It stresses the importance of fighting deforestation and conserving bio-diversity — all things that normal people would consider wise.

The important thing to understand about Agenda 21 is that there is absolutely nothing binding or compelling member countries to implement any part of it. It’s not a treaty — it is entirely voluntary and certainly doesn’t have any connection to local governments. Yet for the right, with its long John Birch Society undercurrent of paranoia about international institutions, Agenda 21 represents some kind of dark UN conspiracy to impose socialism on the “free world.”

That craziness lies at the heart of Michele Bachmann’s quixotic war on energy-efficient lightbulbs. Tim Murphy reported, “The Minnesota congresswoman is part of a movement that considers ‘sustainability’ an existential threat to the United States, one with far-reaching consequences for education, transportation, and family values.”

Last year, during the Denver mayoral race, Tea Party candidate Dan Maes argued that a local bike-sharing program, a popular initiative among city residents, was a “very well-disguised” part of a plan by then-Denver mayor (and now Colorado governor) John Hickenlooper for “converting Denver into a United Nations community.” Alex Jones constantly hawks the conspiracy. Glenn Beck warned it would lead to “centralized control over all of human life on planet Earth.” And in September, Newt Gingrich, hoping to burnish his wingnutty creds, told a group of Orlando Tea Partiers that, if elected, his first order of business would be “to cease all federal funding of any kind of activity that relates to United Nations Agenda 21.” (Currently, no federal funding of any kind is used for implementing Agenda 21.)

It’s causing uprisings like that seen in Virginia at ordinarily dull city planning board meetings across the country. As Stephanie Mencimer reported for Mother Jones, “Agenda 21 paranoia has swept the Tea Party scene, driving activists around the country to delve into the minutiae of local governance… they’re descending on planning meetings and transit debates, wielding PowerPoints about Agenda 21, and generally freaking out low-level bureaucrats with accusations about their roles in a supposed international conspiracy.”

Agenda 21 is inextricably linked to the most dangerous conspiracy theory going: that 97 percent of the world’s climate scientists are lying when they say human activities are contributing to global climate change. This, too, is supposedly in service of the goal of destroying capitalism, which means one has to believe that climatologists around the world are not only all very political — enough to conspire to deceive the entire world — but they also all share the same largely discredited ideology.

Back in Virginia, the Coastal Zone Management program is struggling to “help prepare for the predicted effects of climate change, especially sea-level rise on Virginia’s coastal resources.” The area is uniquely imperiled; in June, Darryl Fears, a science correspondent, reported that Hampton Roads is especially vulnerable because several rivers run through it on their way to the Chesapeake Bay. He continued:

Unfortunately, this crowded, low-lying area also has long-term geological issues to deal with. Thirty-five million years ago, a meteor landed relatively close by and created the Chesapeake Bay Impact Crater. Hampton Roads is also home to a downward-pressing glacial formation created during the Ice Age. Scientists theorize that these ancient occurrences are causing the land to sink — and together account for about one-third of the sea-level change.

Fears notes that “the water has risen so much that Naval Station Norfolk is replacing 14 piers at $60 million each to keep ship-repair facilities high and dry,” but “this geology is lost in local meetings, where distrust of the local and federal governments is at center stage.”

And their harassment is having the desired effect of “freaking out low-level bureaucrats” trying to prepare the area for the changes to come, preparations that have absolutely nothing to do with the United Nations, Agenda 21 or “socialism.” According to Fears, Shereen Hughes, a former planning commissioner, is “worried that some officials are giving ground to fearmongers. The uprising against smart growth ‘is ridiculous’ and ‘a conspiracy theory,’ she said. But it’s effective.”

Planners aren’t saying this is wrong, Hughes said, because “most are afraid they won’t have a job if they’re too vocal about this issue.” Tea Party members have political allies who “might stand up” against planners who complain, Hughes said.

In his excellent book, Collapse, scientist Jared Diamond looked at a number of societies that had seen their physical climates change. He tried to determine what made some cultures die out while others persevered. According to Diamond, it wasn’t the severity of the change, or its speed that was the determining factor. One important variable was the foresight of those societies’ leaders — their ability to properly diagnose the problem and adapt, to come up with proactive solutions to the problems they faced.

Diamond, in an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, said, “one always has to ask about people’s cultural response. Why is it that people failed to perceive the problems developing around them, or if they perceived them, why did they fail to solve the problems that would eventually do them in? Why did some peoples perceive and recognize their problems and others not?” Diamond explained:

A theme that emerges…is insulation of the decision-making elite from the consequences of their actions. That is to say, in societies where the elites do not suffer from the consequences of their decisions, but can insulate themselves, the elite are more likely to pursue their short-term interests, even though that may be bad for the long-term interests of the society, including the children of the elite themselves.

Today, oil and gas corporations are still funding a bunch of crank climate change deniers in order to avoid regulations that might slow their “short-term interests” in extracting as much wealth as they can from traditional hydrocarbons. And here we have Tea Partiers — a “movement” nurtured by business-friendly Republican operatives and backed by the Koch brothers’ dirty energy money — being whipped into a frenzy by the likes of Glenn Beck and shouting down local planners trying to do something about rising water levels. They’re freaking out about energy-efficient lightbulbs and bike-sharing programs, the very sorts of things we need in order to stave off disaster.

So the next time you hear a wingnut spewing feverish nonsense about “climategate” or the “globalist agenda,” remember that this is not just fodder for late-night TV monologues, but the kind of stuff that has in the past brought societies faced with changing environments to their ultimate end.”

N.B.: Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet. He is the author of The 15 Biggest Lies About the Economy: And Everything else the Right Doesn’t Want You to Know About Taxes, Jobs and Corporate America. Drop him an email or follow him on Twitter.

Emphasis Mine

see:http://www.alternet.org/story/153554/how_right-wing_conspiracy_theories_may_pose_a_genuine_threat_to_humanity?page=entire

Could the GOP Collapse on the Payroll Tax be a Turning Point Moment?

“The Republican leadership’s collapse in the battle over extending the payroll tax holiday and unemployment benefits could also be a turning point moment that shifts the political momentum just as we enter the pivotal 2012 election year.
“

chasdarwin2 Comments

From: HuffPost

By: Robert Creamer

“In recent American politics, every major shift in political momentum has resulted from an iconic battle.

In 1995 the tide of the 1994 “Republican Revolution” was reversed when Speaker Newt Gingrich and his new Republican House majority shut down the government in a battle over their attempts to cut Medicare to give tax breaks to the rich (sound familiar). The shutdown ended with – what pundits universally scored — as a victory for President Clinton. That legislative victory began Clinton’s march to overwhelming re-election victory in 1996.

In 2010, Democrats passed President Obama’s landmark health care reform. But they lost the battle for public opinion – and base motivation. That turned the political tide that had propelled President Obama to victory in 2008 and ultimately led to the drubbing Democrats took in the 2010 mid terms.

The Republican leadership’s collapse in the battle over extending the payroll tax holiday and unemployment benefits could also be a turning point moment that shifts the political momentum just as we enter the pivotal 2012 election year.

Here’s why:

1). Since the President launched his campaign for the American Jobs Act, he has driven Congressional Republicans into a political box canyon with very few avenues of escape. The jobs campaign has made it clearer and clearer to the voters that the “do nothing Republican Congress” bears responsibility for preventing the President from taking steps that would create jobs.

Until the payroll tax/unemployment victory, the President had failed to persuade the Republican dominated Congress to pass any provision of the bill – save one aimed at helping veterans. But the polling shows that the public has become more and more disgusted by Congressional intransigence. Since 64% of Americans believe that Congress is run entirely by the Republicans (and from the stand point of stopping legislation itis managed entirely by Republicans), the overall unhappiness with Congress has translated into distain for the “do nothing Republican Congress”.

Congress now has lower approval ratings (11% in the latest poll) than at any time in modern history. Senator Michael Bennett presented data on the Senate floor that showed that Congress is less popular than BP during the gulf oil spill. It is way less popular than Nixon during Watergate. About the same number of Americans have a positive view of Congress as support America becoming a Communist nation. That makes it the worst time imaginable for House Republicans to throw a political tantrum that threatened to increase the tax burden of everyday Americans by $40 per paycheck — $1,000 next year – right after Christmas.

Last weekend, the Senate Republican Leader thought he had blazed a path for Republicans that led out of that political box canyon – at least in so far as the extension of the payroll tax holiday and unemployment. The bi-partisan agreement to temporarily extend the payroll tax holiday and unemployment insurance seemed to give Republicans a face saving option that – at least temporarily — took them off the political hook. But Tea Party stalwarts in the House threatened to mutiny if Boehner went along – and all week – there the House Republicans sat, at the bottom of that canyon with no escape.

House Republicans bet that the President and Democrats were desperate enough to extend the payroll tax and unemployment that they could hold those provisions hostage the way they had held hostage the debt ceiling in August. In an act of unfathomable political ineptitude, they failed to appreciate that this time, Democrats occupied vastly higher political ground.

Failure to continue the payroll tax holiday would have immediately decreased the take home pay of 160 million Americans. By refusing to agree to the compromise that had passed the Senate with an overwhelming bi-partisan majority, House Republicans made it certain that they would have been held responsible.

They might as well have hung out a huge flashing sign in Times Square that said: “Republicans are responsible for cutting your take home pay and eliminating your unemployment benefits.”

Even the conservative editorial page of the Wall Street Journal called on them to throw in the towel.

Democrats had every incentive to hang tough. In the end by refusing to take the escape hatch opened for them by McConnell, the nation watched House Republicans dragged kicking and screaming to support the President’s popular payroll and unemployment extensions.

The outcome of the battle was unambiguous. No one could doubt who stood up for the economic interests of the middle class and who did not. And no one could doubt who won and who lost.

National Journal reported that:

House Republicans on Thursday crumpled under the weight of White House and public pressure and have agreed to pass a two-month extension of the 2 percent payroll-tax cut, Republican and Democratic sources told National Journal.

In the end, Republican intransigence transformed a moment that would have been a modest win for President Obama into an iconic victory.

2). Strength and victory are enormous political assets. Going into the New Year, they now belong to the President and the Democrats.

One of the reasons why the debt ceiling battle inflicted political damage on President Obama is that it made him appear ineffectual – a powerful figure who had been ensnared and held hostage by the Lilliputian pettiness of hundreds of swarming Tea Party ideological zealots.

In the last few months — as he campaigned for the American Jobs Act — he has shaken free of those bonds. Now voters have just watched James Bond or Indiana Jones escape and turn the tables on his adversary.

Great stories are about a protagonist who meets and overcomes a challenge and is victorious. The capitulation of the House Tea Party Republicans is so important because it feels like the beginning of that kind of heroic narrative.

Even today most Americans believe that George Bush and the big Wall Street Banks – not by President Obama — caused the economic crisis. Swing voters have never lost their fondness for the President and don’t doubt his sincerity. But they had begun to doubt his effectiveness. They have had increasing doubts that Obama was up to the challenge of leading them back to economic prosperity.

The narrative set in motion by the events of the last several weeks could be a turning point in voter perception. It could well begin to convince skeptical voters that Obama is precisely the kind of leader they thought he was back in 2008 – a guy with the ability to lead them out of adversity – a leader with the strength, patience, skill, will and resoluteness to lead them to victory.

That now contrasts with the sheer political incompetence of the House Republican Leadership that allowed themselves to be cornered and now find themselves in political disarray. And it certainly contrasts with the political circus we have been watching in the Republican Presidential primary campaign.

3). This victory will inspire the dispirited Democratic base.

Inspiration is the feeling of empowerment – the feeling that you are part of something larger than yourself and can personally play a significant role in achieving that goal. It comes from feeling that together you can overcome challenges and win.

Nothing will do more to inspire committed Democrats than the sight of their leader — President Obama – out maneuvering the House Republicans and forcing them into complete capitulation.

The events of the last several weeks will send a jolt of electricity through the Progressive community.

The right is counting on Progressives to be demoralized and dispirited in the coming election. The President’s victory on the payroll tax and unemployment will make it ever more likely that they will be wrong.

4). When you have them on the run, that’s the time to chase them.

The most important thing about the outcome of the battle over the payroll tax and unemployment is that it shifts the political momentum at a critical time. Momentum is an independent variable in any competitive activity – including politics.

In a football or basketball game you can feel the momentum shift. The tide of battle is all about momentum. The same is true in politics. And in politics it is even more important because the “spectators” are also the players – the voters.

People follow – and vote — for winners. The bandwagon effect is enormously important in political decision-making. Human beings like to travel in packs. They like to be at the center of the mainstream. Momentum shifts affect their perceptions of the mainstream.

For the last two years, the right wing has been on the offensive. Its Tea Party shock troops took the battle to Democratic Members of Congress. In the Mid-Terms Democrats were routed in district after district.

Now the tide has turned. And when the tide turns -when you have them on the run – that’s the time to chase them.

We won’t know for sure until next November whether this moment will take on the same iconic importance as Clinton’s battle with Gingrich in 1995. But there is no doubt that the political wind has shifted. It’s up to Progressives to make the most of it.”

Robert Creamer is a long-time political organizer and strategist, and author of the book: Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, available on Amazon.com. He is a partner in Democracy Partnersand a Senior Strategist for Americans United for Change. Follow him on Twitter @rbcreamer.


Emphasis Mine

see:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-creamer/why-gop-collapse-on-the-p_b_1167491.html