Tag: obama

Ten things the GOP Doesn’t want you to know about the debt!

the inconvenient truth that the nation’s mounting debt is largely attributable to wars, a recession and tax policies put in place under his party’s watch.

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From perspectives see:http://www.perrspectives.com/blog/archives/002215.htm

(N.B.: the author of this blog observes that the correct way to describe the results under each POTUS administration is to add the qualifying word ‘administration’  (and perhaps the definite article ‘the’) to each usage, e.g.: the Clinton administration – the POTUS signs laws passed by both houses.)

“Just two weeks after he seconded Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s dire warnings about the August 2 deadline to raise the U.S debt ceiling, House Majority LeaderEric Cantor walked out of the budget talks aimed at reaching a bipartisan compromise over deficit reduction. Like Arizona GOP Senator Jon Kyl, Cantor shifted the burden to Speaker John Boehner, Senate Minority Mitch McConnell and President Obama to “get over this impasse on taxes.”

For his part, McConnell promised that no deal to end the GOP’s hostage taking of the U.S. economy will include tax hikes. But while McConnell boasted that “If they couldn’t raise taxes when they owned the government, you know they can’t get it done now,” left unsaid was the inconvenient truth that the nation’s mounting debt is largely attributable to wars, a recession and tax policies put in place under his party’s watch.

Here, then, are 10 things the GOP doesn’t want you to know about the debt:

  1. Republican Leaders Agree U.S. Default Would Be a “Financial Disaster”
  2. Ronald Reagan Tripled the National Debt
  3. George W. Bush Doubled the National Debt
  4. Republicans Voted Seven Times to Raise Debt Ceiling for President Bush
  5. Federal Taxes Are Now at a 60 Year Low
  6. Bush Tax Cuts Didn’t Pay for Themselves or Spur “Job Creators”
  7. Ryan Budget Delivers Another Tax Cut Windfall for Wealthy
  8. Ryan Budget Will Require Raising Debt Ceiling – Repeatedly
  9. Tax Cuts Drive the Next Decade of Debt
  10. $3 Trillion Tab for Unfunded Wars Remains Unpaid

1. Republican Leaders Agree U.S. Default Would Be a “Financial Disaster”
Senator Pat Toomey (R-PA), Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) and White House hopeful Tim Pawlenty are among the GOP luminaries who have joined the ranks of what Dana Milbank called the “default deniers.” But you don’t have to take Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s word for it “that if Congress doesn’t agree to an increase in the debt limit by August 2, the United States will be forced to default on its debt, potentially spreading panic and collapse across the globe.” As it turns out, Republican leaders (and their big business backers) have said the same thing.

In their few moments of candor, Republican leaders expressed agreement with Tim Geithner’s assessment that default by the U.S. “would have a catastrophic economic impact that would be felt by every American.” The specter of a global financial cataclysm has been described as resulting in “severe harm” (McCain economic adviser Mark Zandi), “financial collapse and calamity throughout the world” (Senator Lindsey Graham) and “you can’t not raise the debt ceiling” (House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan). In January, even Speaker John Boehner acknowledged as much:

“That would be a financial disaster, not only for our country but for the worldwide economy. Remember, the American people on election day said, ‘we want to cut spending and we want to create jobs.’ And you can’t create jobs if you default on the federal debt.”

2. Ronald Reagan Tripled the National Debt
Among the Republicans who prophesied the default doomsday scenario was none other than conservative patron saint, Ronald Reagan. As he warned Congress in November 1983:

“The full consequences of a default — or even the serious prospect of default — by the United States are impossible to predict and awesome to contemplate. Denigration of the full faith and credit of the United States would have substantial effects on the domestic financial markets and the value of the dollar.”

Reagan knew what he was talking about. (N.B. Really?  Only by accident). After all, the hemorrhage of red ink at the U.S. Treasury was his doing.

As most analysts predicted, Reagan’s massive $749 billion supply-side tax cuts in 1981 quickly produced even more massive annual budget deficits. Combined with his rapid increase in defense spending, Reagan delivered not the balanced budgets he promised, but record-setting debt. Even his OMB alchemist David Stockman could not obscure the disaster with his famous “rosy scenarios.”

Forced to raise taxes eleven times to avert financial catastrophe, the Gipper nonetheless presided over a tripling of the American national debt to nearly $3 trillion. By the time he left office in 1989, Ronald Reagan more than equaled the entire debt burden produced by the previous 200 years of American history. It’s no wonder Stockman lamented last year:

“[The] debt explosion has resulted not from big spending by the Democrats, but instead the Republican Party’s embrace, about three decades ago, of the insidious doctrine that deficits don’t matter if they result from tax cuts.”

It’s no wonder the Gipper cited the skyrocketing deficits he bequeathed to America as his greatest regret.

3. George W. Bush Doubled the National Debt
Following in Reagan’s footsteps, George W. Bush buried the myth of Republican fiscal discipline.

Inheriting a federal budget in the black and CBO forecast for a $5.6 trillion surplus over 10 years, President George W. Bush quickly set about dismantling the progress made under Bill Clinton. Bush’s $1.4 trillion tax cut in 2001, followed by a $550 billion second round in 2003, accounted for the bulk of the yawning budget deficits he produced. (It is more than a little ironic that Paul Ryan ten years ago called the tax cuts “too small” because he believed the estimated surplus Bush eviscerated would be even larger.)

Like Reagan and Stockman before him, Bush resorted to the rosy scenario to claim he would halve the budget deficit by 2009. Before the financial system meltdown last fall, Bush’s deficit already reached $490 billion. (And even before the passage of the Wall Street bailout, Bush had presided over a $4 trillion increase in the national debt, a staggering 71% jump.) By January 2009, the mind-numbing deficit figure reached $1.2 trillion, forcing President Bush to raise the debt ceiling to $11.3 trillion.

4. Republicans Voted Seven Times to Raise Debt Ceiling for President Bush
“Reagan,” Vice President Dick Cheney famously declared in 2002, “proved deficits don’t matter.” Not, that is, unless a Democrat is in the White House.

As Donny Shaw documented in January 2010, Republican intransigence on the debt ceiling only began in earnest when Bush left the White House for good.

The Republicans haven’t always been against increasing the federal debt ceiling. This is the first time in recent history (the past decade or so) that no Republican has voted for the increase. In fact, on most of the ten other votes to increase the federal debt limit that the Senate has taken since 1997, the Republicans provided the majority of the votes in favor.

As it turns out, Republican majorities voted to raise the U.S. debt ceiling seven times while George W. Bush sat in the Oval Office. (It should be noted, as Ezra Kleindid, that party-line votes on debt ceiling increases tied to other legislation is not solely the province of the GOP.) As ThinkProgress pointed out, during the Bush presidency, the current GOP leadership team voted 19 times to increase debt limit. During his tenure, the U.S. national debt doubled, fueled by the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, the Medicare prescription drug plan and the unfunded wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And Mitch McConnell and John Boehner voted for all of it and the debt which ensued because, as Orrin Hatch later explained:

“It was standard practice not to pay for things.”

5. Federal Taxes Now at a 60 Year Low
Even as Vice President Biden leads bipartisan negotiations to trim at least $1 trillion from the national debt, Republican leaders faithfully regurgitate the refrain that tax increases are “off the table.” In one form or another, Mitch McConnell, Eric Cantor and just about every other conservative mouthpiece parroted Speaker John Boehner’s line that:

“Medicare, Medicaid – everything should be on the table, except raising taxes.”

Which purely by the numbers (if not ideology) is an odd position to take. After all, as a percentage of the U.S. economy, the total federal tax bite hasn’t been this low in 60 years.

As the chart representing President Obama’s 2012 budget proposal above reflects, the American tax burden hasn’t been this low in generations. Thanks to the combination of the Bush Recession and the latest Obama tax cuts, the AP reported, “as a share of the nation’s economy, Uncle Sam’s take this year will be the lowest since 1950, when the Korean War was just getting under way.” In January, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) explained that “revenues would be just under 15 percent of GDP; levels that low have not been seen since 1950.” That finding echoed an earlier analysis from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Last April, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities concluded, “Middle-income Americans are now paying federal taxes at or near historically low levels, according to the latest available data.” As USA Today reported last May, the BEA data debunked yet another right-wing myth:

Federal, state and local taxes — including income, property, sales and other taxes — consumed 9.2% of all personal income in 2009, the lowest rate since 1950, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reports. That rate is far below the historic average of 12% for the last half-century. The overall tax burden hit bottom in December at 8.8% of income before rising slightly in the first three months of 2010.“The idea that taxes are high right now is pretty much nuts,” says Michael Ettlinger, head of economic policy at the liberal Center for American Progress.

Or as former Reagan Treasury official Bruce Bartlett explained it this week the New York Times:

In short, by the broadest measure of the tax rate, the current level is unusually low and has been for some time. Revenues were 14.9 percent of G.D.P. in both 2009 and 2010. Yet if one listens to Republicans, one would think that taxes have never been higher, that an excessive tax burden is the most important constraint holding back economic growth and that a big tax cut is exactly what the economy needs to get growing again.

6. Bush Tax Cuts Didn’t Pay for Themselves or Spur “Job Creators”
That Republican intransigence persists despite the complete debunking of two of the GOP’s favorite myths.

The first tried and untrue Republican talking point is that “tax cuts pay for themselves.” Sadly, that right-wing mythmaking is belied by the massive Bush deficits, half of which (as the CBPP chart in section 3 above shows} were the result of the Bush tax cuts themselves. As a percentage of the American economy, tax revenues peaked in 2000; that is, before the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003. Despite President Bush’s bogus claim that “You cut taxes and the tax revenues increase,” Uncle Sam’s cash flow from individual income taxes did not return to its pre-dot com bust level until 2006.

The second GOP fairy tale, as expressed by Speaker Boehner, is that “The top one percent of wage earners in the United States…pay forty percent of the income taxes…The people he’s {President Obama] is talking about taxing are the very people that we expect to reinvest in our economy.”

If so, the Republican’s so-called “Job Creators” failed to meet those expectations under George W. Bush. After all, the last time the top tax rate was 39.6% during the Clinton administration, the United States enjoyed rising incomes, 23 million new jobs and budget surpluses. Under Bush? Not so much.

On January 9, 2009, the Republican-friendly Wall Street Journal summed it up with an article titled simply, “Bush on Jobs: the Worst Track Record on Record.” (The Journal’s interactive table quantifies his staggering failure relative to every post-World War II president.) The dismal 3 million jobs created under President Bush didn’t merely pale in comparison to the 23 million produced during Bill Clinton’s tenure. In September 2009, the Congressional Joint Economic Committee charted Bush’s job creation disaster, the worst since Hoover:

As David Leonhardt of the New York Times aptly concluded last year:

Those tax cuts passed in 2001 amid big promises about what they would do for the economy. What followed? The decade with the slowest average annual growth since World War II. Amazingly, that statement is true even if you forget about the Great Recession and simply look at 2001-7.

7. Ryan Budget Delivers Another Tax Cut Windfall for Wealthy
Looking at that dismal performance, Leonhardt rightly asked, “Why should we believe that extending the Bush tax cuts will provide a big lift to growth?” At a time ofrecord income inequality which saw the incomes of the richest 400 Americans taxpayers double even as their tax rates were halved, that’s a fair question to say the least.

For Paul Ryan and the Republican Party, the answer is simple: because we said so.

As Ezra Klein, Paul Krugman and Steve Benen among others noted, the House Republicans “Plan for America’s Job Creators” is simply a repackaging of years of previous proposals and GOP bromides. (As Klein pointed out, the 10 page document “looks like the staffer in charge forgot the assignment was due on Thursday rather than Friday, and so cranked the font up to 24 and began dumping clip art to pad out the plan.”) At the center of it is the same plan from the Ryan House budget passed in April to cut the top individual and corporate tax rates to 25%.

The price tag for the Republican proposal is a jaw-dropping $4.2 trillion. And as Matthew Yglesias explained, earlier analyses of similar proposals in Ryan’s Roadmap reveal that working Americans would have to pick up the tab left unpaid by upper-income households:

This is an important element of Ryan’s original “roadmap” plan that’s never gotten the attention it deserves. But according to a Center for Tax Justice analysis (PDF), even though Ryan features large aggregate tax cuts, ninety percent of Americans would actually pay higher taxes under his plan.In other words, it wasn’t just cuts in middle class benefits in order to cut taxes on the rich. It was cuts in middle class benefits and middle class tax hikes in order to cut taxes on the rich. It’ll be interesting to see if the House Republicans formally introduce such a plan and if so how many people will vote for it.

We now know the answer: 235 House Republicans and 40 GOP Senators.

8. Ryan Budget Will Require Raising Debt Ceiling – Repeatedly
Largely overlooked in the media coverage of the Republican debt ceiling hostage drama is this: those 235 House Republicans and 40 GOP Senators who supported Paul Ryan’s 2012 budget bill voted to add $6 trillion to the U.S. national debt over the next decade. And that means, as Speaker John Boehner acknowledged, Republicans now and in the future would have to increase the debt ceiling – repeatedly.

Of course, you’d never know that based on the incendiary rhetoric from the leading lights of the Republican Party and their right-wing echo chamber. Senator Rand Paul(R-KY) said his vote to bump up the debt ceiling would come at the cost of a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, “the last time we’re doing it.” His South Carolina colleague Jim Demint threatened to filibuster the increase, even if it meant the GOP’s “Waterloo.” The number two House Republican Eric Cantor (R-VA) regurgitated that line, telling Democrats the GOP “will not grant their request for a debt limit increase” without major spending cuts or budget process reforms.” For his part, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan insisted, “We won’t raise, just simply raise, the debt limit,” adding, “We will vote to have spending cuts and controls in conjunction with the debt limit increase.” As giddy right-wing bloggers like Patterico described the right-wing’s scorched earth strategy:

If Republicans are going to vote to raise the debt ceiling — and not to do so will indeed cause financial chaos — they have to extract concessions sufficient that they can credibly say: this is the last such vote we will ever have to have.

Sadly, as Ezra Klein of the Washington Post explained last month, “Republicans can’t meet their own deficit and spending targets.” The Ryan plan to privatize Medicare, slash and convert Medicaid into block grants, and deliver another tax-cut windfall for the wealthy nevertheless “blows through both their spending and debt caps”:

House Republicans voted to make the Ryan budget law. But the Ryan budget includes $6 trillion in new debt over the next 10 years, which means that to become law, the Ryan budget would require a substantial increase in the debt ceiling. But before the Republicans agree to increase the debt ceiling so that the budget they passed can become law, Republicans are demanding the passage of either a balanced budget amendment that would make the Ryan budget unconstitutional or a spending cap that the Ryan budget would, in certain years (and if you’re using more realistic numbers, in all years), exceed.

It’s no wonder Klein’s Washington Post colleague Matt Miller deemed the Republican budgetary horror story “The Shining – National Debt Edition” before concluding that Boehner’s “awe-inspiring hypocrisy on the debt limit” is one of those moments of “political behavior that can only be dubbed Super-Duper Hypocrisy So Brazen They Must Really Think We’re Idiots.”

9. Tax Cuts Drive the Next Decade of Debt
“President Obama’s agenda, ambitious as it may be, is responsible for only a sliver of the deficits, despite what many of his Republican critics are saying,” the New York Times’ David Leonhardt explained in 2009, adding, “The economic growth under George W. Bush did not generate nearly enough tax revenue to pay for his agenda, which included tax cuts, the Iraq war, and Medicare prescription drug coverage.” That fall, former Reagan Treasury official Bruce Bartlett offered just that kind of honesty to the born again deficit virgins of his Republican Party. Noting that the FY2009 deficit of $1.4 trillion was solely due to lower tax revenues and not increased spending, Bartlett concluded:

“I think there are grounds on which to criticize the Obama administration’s anti-recession actions. But spending too much is not one of them. Indeed, based on this analysis, it is pretty obvious that spending – real spending on things like public works – has been grossly inadequate. The idea that Reagan-style tax cuts would have done anything is just nuts.”

Which is exactly right. Thanks to the steep recession, as the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and others have documented time and again, the overall federal tax burden as a percentage of GDP is now down to levels not seen since Harry Truman was in the White House. (The two-year tax cut compromise in December didn’t help any, adding $400 billion to the deficit this year and next.) But is the Bush tax cuts themselves, which Republicans want to make permanent and then (as the Ryan budget mandates) lower further, which account for much of the revenue drain into the future.

As a recent analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities showed, over the next decade the Bush tax cuts account for more of the nation’s debt than Iraq, Afghanistan, TARP, the stimulus, and revenue lost to the recession combined:

10. $3 Trillion Tab for Unfunded Wars Remains Unpaid
Over the next ten years, the costs of America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will decline as the U.S. commitments there come to an end. But almost ten years, 6,000 U.S. dead and over a trillion dollars after the attacks of September 11, it’s time to pay for our wars.

In May, the National Journal estimated that the total cost to the U.S. economy of the war against Al Qaeda will reach $3 trillion. In 2008, Nobel Prize-winning economistJoseph Stiglitz put the price of the Iraq conflict alone at $3 trillion.

But by 2020 and beyond, the direct cost to U.S. taxpayers could reach $3 trillion. In March, the Congressional Research Service put the total cost of the wars at $1.28 trillion, including $806 billion for Iraq and $444 billion for Afghanistan. For the 2012 fiscal year which begins on October 1, President Obama asked for $117 billion more. (That war-fighting funding is over and above Secretary Gates’ $553 billion Pentagon budget request for next year.)

But in addition to the roughly $1.5 trillion tally for both conflicts through the theoretical 2014 American draw down date in Afghanistan, the U.S. faces staggering bills for veterans’ health care and disability benefits. Last May, an analysis by the Center for American Progress estimated the total projected total cost of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans’ health care and disability could reach between $422 billion to $717 billion. Reconstruction aid and other development assistance represent tens of billions more, as does the additional interest on the national debt. And none of the above counts the expanded funding for the new Department of Homeland Security.

But that two-plus trillion dollar tab doesn’t account for the expansion of the United States military since the start of the “global war on terror.” As a percentage of the American economy, defense spending jumped from 3.1% in 2001 to 4.8% last year. While ThinkProgress noted that the Pentagon’s FY 2012 ask is “the largest request ever since World War II,” McClatchy explained:

Such a boost would mark the 14th year in a row that Pentagon spending has increased, despite the waning U.S. presence in Iraq. In dollars, Pentagon spending has more than doubled in 10 years. Even adjusted for inflation, the Defense Department budget has risen 65% in the past decade.

Even as the World Trade Center site was still smoldering, Republicans insisted Al Qaeda represented an existential threat to the United States. President Bush repeatedly compared 9/11 to Pearl Harbor and his war on terror to World War II. But he never asked Americans to join the military or sacrifice at home. Instead, Bush told us to go shopping and “get down to Disney World.”

From a public policy standpoint, post-9/11 America in no way resembles FDR’s response to Pearl Harbor. George W. Bush was the first modern president to cut taxes during wartime. Barack Obama was the second.

Its time, as Bernie Sanders, Al Franken and the Congressional Progressive Caucus each proposed, to begin paying for the unfunded conflicts fought in our name.”

Emphasis Mine

The Failure of The Free Market…

After all, the threat to a healthy democracy from concentrated wealth had been known to American leaders for generations.

chasdarwin2 Comments

From Alternet, By Robert Parry

If Ayn Rand and the Free Market Fetishists Were Right, We’d be Living in a Golden Age — Does This Look Like a Golden Age to You?

The lavish rewards flowing to the titans of industry have not exactly transformed society into a vibrant force for beneficial progress.

If the “free-market” theories of Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman were correct, the United States of the last three decades should have experienced a golden age in which the lavish rewards flowing to the titans of industry would have transformed the society into a vibrant force for beneficial progress.

After all, it has been faith in “free-market economics” as a kind of secular religion that has driven U.S. government policies – from the emergence of Ronald Reagan through the neo-liberalism of Bill Clinton into the brave new world of House Republican budget chairman Paul Ryan.

By slashing income tax rates to historically low levels – and only slightly boosting them under President Clinton before dropping them again under George W. Bush – the U.S. government essentially incentivized greed or what Ayn Rand liked to call “the virtue of selfishness.”

Further, by encouraging global “free trade” and removing regulations like the New Deal’s Glass-Steagall separation of commercial and investment banks, the government also got out of the way of “progress,” even if that “progress” has had crushing results for many middle-class Americans.

True, not all the extreme concepts of author/philosopher Ayn Rand and economist Milton Friedman have been implemented – there are still programs like Social Security and Medicare to get rid of – but their “magic of the market” should be glowing by now.

We should be able to assess whether laissez-faire capitalism is superior to the mixed public-private economy that dominated much of the 20th Century.

The old notion was that a relatively affluent middle class would contribute to the creation of profitable businesses because average people could afford to buy consumer goods, own their own homes and take an annual vacation with the kids. That “middle-class system,” however, required intervention by the government as the representative of the everyman.

Beyond building a strong infrastructure for growth – highways, airports, schools, research programs, a safe banking system, a common defense, etc. – the government imposed a progressive tax structure that helped pay for these priorities and also discouraged the accumulation of massive wealth.

After all, the threat to a healthy democracy from concentrated wealth had been known to American leaders for generations.

A century ago, it was Republican President Theodore Roosevelt who advocated for a progressive income tax and an estate tax. In the 1930s, it was Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt, who dealt with the economic and societal carnage that under-regulated financial markets inflicted on the nation during the Great Depression.

With those hard lessons learned, the federal government acted on behalf of the common citizen to limit Wall Street’s freewheeling ways and to impose high tax rates on excessive wealth.

So, during Dwight Eisenhower’s presidency of the 1950s, the marginal tax rate on the top tranche of earnings for the richest Americans was about 90 percent. When Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, the top rate was still around 70 percent.

Discouraging Greed

Greed was not simply frowned upon; it was discouraged.

Put differently, government policy was to maintain some degree of egalitarianism within the U.S. political-economic system. And to a remarkable degree, the strategy worked.

The American middle class became the envy of the world, with otherwise average folk earning enough money to support their families comfortably and enjoy some pleasures of life that historically had been reserved only for the rich.

Without doubt, there were serious flaws in the U.S. system, especially due to the legacies of racism and sexism. And it was when the federal government responded to powerful social movements that demanded those injustices be addressed in the 1960s and 1970s, that an opening was created for right-wing politicians to exploit resentments among white men, particularly in the South.

By posing as populists hostile to “government social engineering,” the Right succeeded in duping large numbers of middle-class Americans into seeing their own interests – and their “freedom” – as in line with corporate titans who also decried federal regulations, including those meant to protect average citizens, like requiring seat belts in cars and discouraging cigarette smoking.

Amid the sluggish economy of the 1970s, the door swung open wider for the transformation of American society that had been favored by the likes of Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman, putting the supermen of industry over the everyman of democracy.

Friedman tested out his “free-market” theories in the socio-economic laboratories of brutal military dictatorships in Latin America, most famously collaborating with Chile’s Gen. Augusto Pinochet who crushed political opponents with torture and assassinations.

Ayn Rand became the darling of the American Right with her books, such asAtlas Shrugged, promoting the elitist notion that brilliant individuals represented the engine of society and that government efforts to lessen social inequality or help the average citizen were unjust and unwise.

The Pied Piper

Yet, while Rand and Friedman gave some intellectual heft to “free-market” theories, Ronald Reagan proved to be the perfect pied piper for guiding millions of working Americans in a happy dance toward their own serfdom.

In his first inaugural address, Reagan declared that “government is the problem” – and many middle-class whites cheered.

However, what Reagan’s policies meant in practice was a sustained assault on the middle class: the busting of unions, the export of millions of decent-paying jobs, and the transfer of enormous wealth to the already rich. The tax rates for the wealthiest were slashed about in half. Greed was incentivized.

Ironically, the Reagan era came just as technology – much of it created by government-funded research – was on the cusp of creating extraordinary wealth that could have been shared with average Americans. Those benefits instead accrued to the top one or two percent.

The rich also benefited from the off-shoring of jobs, exploiting cheap foreign labor and maximizing profits. The only viable way for the super-profits of “free trade” to be shared with the broader U.S. population was through taxes on the rich. However, Reagan and his anti-government true-believers made sure that those taxes were kept at historically low levels.

The Ayn Rand/Milton Friedman theories may have purported to believe that the “free market” would somehow generate benefits for the society as a whole, but their ideas really represented a moralistic frame which held that it was somehow right that the wealth of the society should go to its “most productive” members and that the rest of us were essentially “parasites.”

Apparently, special people like Rand also didn’t need to be encumbered by philosophical consistency. Though a fierce opponent of the welfare state, Rand secretly accepted the benefits of Medicare after she was diagnosed with lung cancer, according to one of her assistants.

She connived to have Evva Pryor, an employee of Rand’s law firm, arrange Social Security and Medicare benefits for Ann O’Connor, Ayn Rand using an altered spelling of her first name and her husband’s last name.

In 100 Voices: An Oral History of Ayn Rand, Scott McConnell, founder of the Ayn Rand Institute’s media department, quoted Pryor as justifying Rand’s move by saying: “Doctors cost a lot more money than books earn and she could be totally wiped out.” Yet, it didn’t seem to matter much if “average” Americans were wiped out.

Essentially, the Right was promoting the Social Darwinism of the 19th Century, albeit in chic new clothes. The Gilded Age from a century ago was being recreated behind Reagan’s crooked smile, Clinton’s good-ole-boy charm and George W. Bush’s Texas twang.

Whenever the political descendants of Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt tried to steer the nation back toward programs that would benefit the middle class and demand greater sacrifice from the super-rich, the wheel was grabbed again by politicians and pundits shouting the epithet, “tax-and-spend.”

Many average Americans were pacified by reminders of how Reagan made them feel good with his rhetoric about “the shining city on the hill.”

The Rand/Friedman elitism also remains alive with today’s arguments from Republicans who protest the idea of raising taxes on businessmen and entrepreneurs because they are the ones who “create the jobs,” even if there is little evidence that they are actually creating American jobs.

Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wisconsin, who is leading the fight to replace Medicare with a voucher system that envisions senior citizens buying health insurance from profit-making companies, cites Ayn Rand as his political inspiration.

A Land for Billionaires

The consequences of several decades of Reaganism and its related ideas are now apparent. Wealth has been concentrated at the top with billionaires living extravagant lives that not even monarchs could have envisioned, while the middle class shrinks and struggles, with one everyman after another being shoved down into the lower classes and into poverty.

Millions of Americans forego needed medical care because they can’t afford health insurance; millions of young people, burdened by college loans, crowd back in with their parents; millions of trained workers settle for low-paying jobs; millions of families skip vacations and other simple pleasures of life.

Beyond the unfairness, there is the macro-economic problem which comes from massive income disparity. A healthy economy is one where the vast majority people can buy products, which can then be manufactured more cheaply, creating a positive cycle of profits and prosperity.

With Americans unable to afford the new car or the new refrigerator, American corporations see their domestic profit margins squeezed. So they are compensating for the struggling U.S. economy by expanding their businesses abroad in developing markets, but they also keep their profits there.

There are now economic studies that confirm what Americans have been sensing in their own lives, though the mainstream U.S. news media tends to attribute these trends to cultural changes, rather than political choices.

For instance, the Washington Post published a lengthy front-page article on June 19, describing the findings of researchers who gained access to economic data from the Internal Revenue Service which revealed which categories of taxpayers were making the high incomes.

To the surprise of some observers, the big bucks were not flowing primarily to athletes or actors or even stock market speculators. America’s new super-rich were mostly corporate chieftains.

As the Post’s Peter Whoriskey framed the story, U.S. business underwent a cultural transformation from the 1970s when chief executives believed more in sharing the wealth than they do today.

The article cites a U.S. dairy company CEO from the 1970s, Kenneth J. Douglas, who earned the equivalent of about $1 million a year. He lived comfortably but not ostentatiously. Douglas had an office on the second floor of a milk distribution center, and he turned down raises because he felt it would hurt morale at the plant, Whoriskey reported.

However, just a few decades later, Gregg L. Engles, the current CEO of the same company, Dean Foods, averages about 10 times what Douglas made. Engles works in a glittering high-rise office building in Dallas; owns a vacation estate in Vail, Colorado; belongs to four golf clubs; and travels in a $10 million corporate jet. He apparently has little concern about what his workers think.

“The evolution of executive grandeur – from very comfortable to jet-setting – reflects one of the primary reasons that the gap between those with the highest incomes and everyone else is widening,” Whoriskey reported.

“For years, statistics have depicted growing income disparity in the United States, and it has reached levels not seen since the Great Depression. In 2008, the last year for which data are available, for example, the top 0.1 percent of earners took in more than 10 percent of the personal income in the United States, including capital gains, and the top 1 percent took in more than 20 percent.

“But economists had little idea who these people were. How many were Wall Street financiers? Sports stars? Entrepreneurs? Economists could only speculate, and debates over what is fair stalled. Now a mounting body of economic research indicates that the rise in pay for company executives is a critical feature in the widening income gap.”

Jet-Setting Execs

The Post article continued: “The largest single chunk of the highest-income earners, it turns out, are executives and other managers in firms, according to a landmark analysis of tax returns by economists Jon Bakija, Adam Cole and Bradley T. Heim. These are not just executives from Wall Street, either, but from companies in even relatively mundane fields such as the milk business.

“The top 0.1 percent of earners make about $1.7 million or more, including capital gains. Of those, 41 percent were executives, managers and supervisors at non-financial companies, according to the analysis, with nearly half of them deriving most of their income from their ownership in privately-held firms.

“An additional 18 percent were managers at financial firms or financial professionals at any sort of firm. In all, nearly 60 percent fell into one of those two categories. Other recent research, moreover, indicates that executive compensation at the nation’s largest firms has roughly quadrupled in real terms since the 1970s, even as pay for 90 percent of America has stalled.”

While these new statistics are striking – suggesting a broader problem with high-level greed than might have been believed – the Post ducked any political analysis that would have laid blame on Ronald Reagan and various right-wing economic theories.

In a follow-up editorial on June 26, the Post lamented the nation’s growing income inequality but shied away from proposing higher marginal tax rates on the rich or faulting the past several decades of low tax rates. Instead, the Post suggested perhaps going after deductions on employer-provided health insurance and mortgage interest, tax breaks that also help middle-class families.

It appears that in Official Washington and inside the major U.S. news media the idea of learning from past presidents, including the Roosevelts and Dwight Eisenhower, is a non-starter. Instead there’s an unapologetic embrace of the theories of Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman, an affection that can pop out at unusual moments.

Addressing a CNBC “Fast Money” panel last year, movie director Oliver Stone was taken aback when one CNBC talking head gushed how Stone’s “Wall Street” character Gordon Gecko had been an inspiration, known for his famous comment, “Greed is good.” A perplexed Stone responded that Gecko, who made money by breaking up companies and eliminating jobs, was meant to be a villain.

However, the smug attitude of the CNBC stock picker represented a typical tribute to Ronald Reagan’s legacy. After all, greed did not simply evolve from some vague shift in societal attitudes, as the Post suggests. Rather, it was stimulated – and rewarded – by Reagan’s tax policies.

Reagan’s continued popularity also makes it easier for today’s “no-tax-increase” crowd to demand only spending cuts as a route to reducing the federal debt, an ocean of red ink largely created by the tax cuts of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.

Tea Partiers, in demanding even more cuts in government help for average citizens and even more tax cuts for the rich, represent only the most deluded part of middle-class America. A recent poll of Americans rated Reagan the greatest U.S. president ever, further enshrining his anti-government message in the minds of many Americans, even those in the battered middle class.

When a majority of Americans voted for Republicans in Election 2010 – and with early polls pointing toward a likely GOP victory in the presidential race of 2012 – it’s obvious that large swaths of the population have no sense of what’s in store for them as they position their own necks under the boots of corporate masters.

The only answer to this American crisis would seem to be a reenergized and democratized federal government fighting for average citizens and against the greedy elites. But – after several decades of Reaganism, with the “free market” religion the new gospel of the political/media classes – that seems a difficult outcome to achieve.

see:http://www.alternet.org/media/151426/why_do_people_believe_stupid_stuff%2C_even_when_they%27re_confronted_with_the_truth/

Addressing our Revenue Crises

Democrats are right that this is a terrible moment for spending cuts

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By   from the Washington Post

There is no good reason for negotiations on the budget and the debt ceiling to be deadlocked, because the solution is obvious: First, do no harm.

The Hippocratic injunction should be something befuddled economists and warring politicians can agree on. With the nation struggling to recover from a devastating recession, unemployment stuck at crisis levels, financial markets spooked by the possibility of European defaults and consumers disinclined to consume, it makes no earthly sense to suck money out of the economy.

Democrats are right that this is a terrible moment for spending cuts. Republicans are right that this is an awful moment for tax increases. The only reasonable thing to do is kick the can down the road — but in a purposeful, intelligent way.

As a practical matter, this means Republicans must swallow an increase in the debt ceiling, and Democrats must accept painful spending curbs that kick in when the economy is off its sickbed. It means conservatives have to be patient in bringing expenditures down and progressives have to be patient in returning tax rates — even for the wealthy — to what many of us consider appropriate levels.

All this is clear — even as much else about the economy and its prognosis becomes increasingly murky.

Indeed, it is reasonable to ask whether the “dismal science” of economics even works anymore as a reliable tool for analysis and prediction. While some economists remain staunch, unwavering disciples of John Maynard Keynes or Milton Friedman, others have begun couching their words. It’s almost as if the laws governing the universe of money have changed.

Two years ago at a seminar, I heard a distinguished economic forecaster confidently explain how the recovery would proceed. While some usually reliable indicators were anomalous and contradictory, he said, the one thing he knew from the historical record was that sharp, deep recessions are followed by steep, roaring recoveries. By the second quarter of 2010, he said, growth would be as high as 4 percent and unemployment would be tumbling. Happy days would be here again.

I won’t embarrass the man by naming him, since he wasn’t much farther off base than many of his peers. No economic orthodoxy has come through the past few years unscathed.

At least former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan — once a firm, unquestioning believer in deregulation — had the honesty to admit that the 2008 financial meltdown exposed a “flaw” in his ideology and left him “in a state of shocked disbelief.” That’s where the whole economics profession should be.

But even if economists don’t know where the nation and the world are heading, there’s plenty of data to tell us where we are right now. Unemployment was at 9.1 percent in May, up from 9 percent in April. Housing starts were up slightly after having declined sharply the previous month. Retail sales were down a fraction after being up a fraction. Taking a longer view, the economy has clearly improved over the past year — but the improvement is slow, wobbly and fragile.

Given this state of affairs, it’s hard to imagine how taking money out of consumers’ hands — either through cuts in government spending or tax increases — could possibly make things better. It’s easy to see how such measures could make things worse.

Likewise, it’s hard to believe that running trillion-dollar deficits every year is sound policy. Economists who confidently tell us that it’s no problem that the national debt is approaching 100 percent of gross domestic product sound as if they’re whistling past the graveyard. I believe it would be a long, long time before the financial markets began to see the United States as a great big Greece, but at some point that day would come.

And how could Congress turn a long-range crisis into an immediate disaster? By stubbornly refusing to raise the debt ceiling, which would be the economic equivalent of a toddler’s temper tantrum.

It’s clear what needs to be done. President Obama and congressional leaders should agree on a series of firm deficit caps that would reduce the debt over time. This must be accompanied by a reasonable increase in the debt ceiling.

Then we will spend years engaged in a difficult but necessary fight over what kind of government we want and how much we’re willing to pay for it. At present, we’re operating a heavily armed, heavily indebted health insurance company — a giant, profligate Aetna or Prudential, with nuclear weapons. That’s not going to win the 21st century.

emphasis mine

see:http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dont-make-the-economy-worse/2011/06/27/AGBoRDoH_story.html?wpisrc=nl_opinions

Thought Police: How the Tea Party’s Assault on Dissenting Thought Has Trapped the GOP

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From Alternet, by Paul Waldman,in the American Prospect

(N.B.: This is good news for progressivism in 2012.  It is early, but it is clear the Tea Party mind set is here for a while…)

The Right has always policed dissenting thought in its ranks. But in the past few years the Tea Party has upped the ante.
May 24, 2011  |
“Newt Gingrich probably thought he was being smart when a week ago he publicly rejected the budget plan put forward by House Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan. After all, Ryan’s idea to change Medicare into a voucher program is profoundly unpopular, particularly with the seniors now enjoying the program’s benefits. So when Gingrich went on Meet the Press and responded to a question about the Ryan Medicare plan by saying, “I don’t think right-wing social engineering is any more desirable than left-wing social engineering,” it probably felt politically shrewd. He could distance himself from an unpopular idea and position himself not as the partisan bomb-thrower people used to consider him but as the innovative, post-partisanthinker he fancies himself to be.

It might have been a reasonable strategy — in a different era. But in 2011, identity defines politics more than ever. Gingrich’s mistake was his failure to understand that particularly at this stage of the race, no question is more important for a presidential candidate to answer than this: Are you one of us?

This question is crucial for both progressives and conservatives. Politics in America is deeply tribal and always has been. But in today’s political world, the right has a more highly developed system of policingits ideological borders. And since only Republicans have a primary race this election, that system is operating more swiftly, efficiently, and effectively than anything the left could dream of.

What the right has — as Gingrich discovered last week to his chagrin — is a ruthless identity border patrol, with agents spread throughout the political system. Step over any one of a number of lines, even lines that didn’t exist just weeks ago, and those agents will inform you, with all the subtlety of a truncheon to the kneecaps, that you are no longer within the conservative nation. “For Republicans running for president in 2012, there’s a new political reality: Support Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget plan — or else,”wrote the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza. “Newt Gingrich learned that lesson the hard way.” And did he ever. “A candidate who is timid on entitlement reforms is not qualified to be president,” wrote Dick Armey and Matt Kibbe of FreedomWorks, a group that trains and organizes Tea Partiers, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. “He’s done,” Charles Krauthammer declared on Fox News. “He didn’t have a big chance from the beginning, but now it’s over.” Republicans in Congress lined up to condemn the former speaker, who, it must be said, already had more than a few enemies on the right and handed Democrats a juicy video clip they’ll be sure to use in future ads (“Even Newt Gingrich called the Ryan plan ‘right-wing social engineering'”).

As much as liberals like to imagine the right as a hierarchically organized, smoothly humming machine, the truth is that their system is diffuse, much more like a school of fish than one giant shark. A variety of players influence the school’s course: politicians, media figures, activists, and advocates. It isn’t a conspiracy in which orders are delivered from above. If there really were a conspiracy, it would be headed by someone with enough sense to say, “This Medicare plan is really risky. Let’s not make it a litmus test.”

But no one has that ability, particularly in a party that is still both in thrall to and terrified of the Tea Party. After mounting successful primary challenges against sitting Republicans in 2010, the Tea Party has settled comfortably into its role as the vanguard of the Republican identity border patrol, deciding who is and who isn’t a conservative in good standing. Some Tea Party challenges for 2012 are already materializing (Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, respected on both sides of the aisle after 35 years in office, is likely to be booted by his Tea Party opponent), while even hard-right conservatives like Orrin Hatch are forced to abase themselves before the border patrol agents to demonstrate their bona fides.

The candidates seeking the presidency know that their standing as true conservatives is always at risk, that the gaze of the border patrol agents could fall on them at any moment. A few years ago, support for an individual health-insurance mandate and a cap-and-trade system to reduce carbon emissions were reasonable conservative positions; today, having ever entertained those ideas will get you branded as something other than a real conservative. This leaves the GOP presidential candidates in a bind because most of them embraced one or both in the past; now they have to sink to their knees and beg for forgiveness. In the case of the Ryan plan, something that didn’t exist just a few weeks ago has to some become nearly as central to conservative identity as opposition to abortion or taxes. For his criticism, Gingrich found it necessary to go on a humiliating contrition tour, first calling Ryan to apologize, then appearing on Rush Limbaugh’s program to make the bizarre assertion that he wasn’t even talking about the Ryan budget on Meet the Press, that he would have voted for it, and that he and Paul Ryan are buddies.

The other candidates are doing their best to assure conservatives that they’re on board, while simultaneously trying to avoid the political stain. Jon Huntsman saidhe would have voted for the Ryan plan. Mitt Romney tied himself in a knot about it, saying, “The Ryan plan and my plan are on the same page, we have the same objectives,” while leaving himself an out: “My plan is different than his, it’s not identical. But I applaud the fact that he put forward a plan.” Tim Pawlenty too has been careful to avoid criticizing Ryan’s plan, though he promises to deliver one of his own soon.

The candidates have little choice but to tread gingerly, because at this early stage of the presidential race, most of the people they encounter are party activists who have deputized themselves in the identity border patrol. Going from living room to VFW hall in Iowa eight months before the caucuses, they won’t be talking to independent voters. They will be courting partisans who care deeply about questions of identity. In some primary elections, the discussion among partisans might concern electability, or experience, or competence. But not this year. After constructing their opposition to Barack Obama around the idea that the president isn’t really American — either literally a foreigner or practically one by virtue of philosophy and record — today’s Republicans are acutely tuned to detect any whiff of heresy and concerned most deeply with which candidate lives deepest within the heart of their tribe.

There are plenty of activists on the left who would like nothing more than to have the same power the right’s base has. But they don’t. None of the components of the liberal base — union members, minorities, non-Christians (those of other faiths and the secular), urbanites, single people — inspires even a shadow of the fear in Democratic elites that the Tea Party, the Christian right, or gun advocates produce in the Republican elite. Nor do progressive media figures have anything comparable to the power within their movement that someone like Rush Limbaugh has (try to imagine Democratic leaders being forced to make groveling apologies to Rachel Maddow for criticizing her, the way Republican leaders have when they stepped out of line and criticized Limbaugh). That fear is evidence of the multiple veto points within the conservative system, the fact that many people have the power to make life miserable for Republicans who don’t stay within the borders.

Identity lies at the core of politics, no matter what your ideology. It’s the reason candidates portray themselves as coming from humble beginnings and feeling at home among regular folks or say they have “[insert our state name here] values” and their opponent doesn’t. It underlies all the key political divides we have — North versus South, urban versus rural, the “heartland” versus the coasts. It is behind every attack on the “elite,” whether from the left or the right and whether offered honestly or not. It’s written all through human history, from the first moment a hominid tribe decided that there were others of their kind who were outsiders and could not be trusted.

And Newt Gingrich knows it as well as anyone. When he said that Barack Obama “is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together” who the president is, he was just the latest version of the homo erectus grunting to his tribesmen that his rival has been seen visiting that cave on the other side of the valley and therefore must be slain lest the tribe be contaminated. But he failed to pay close enough attention to where the borders of identity had moved, and he paid the price. It will not be the last time in this election cycle that a candidate’s identity as a member of the tribe is challenged.

Emphasis mine.

see:http://www.alternet.org/story/151071/thought_police%3A_how_the_tea_party%27s_assault_on_dissenting_thought_has_trapped_the_gop?akid=7010.123424.rCB3yY&rd=1&t=2

The Right’s ‘Big Lie’ Strategy: When Losing, Simply Rewrite History

“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” America, the Tea Party GOP is coming for your kids.

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“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”  (1984, George Orwell)

From AlterNet: Contemporary conservatives aim to disseminate an alternate version of reality through the media echo chamber and the schools.

America, the Tea Party GOP is coming for your kids.

Mike Huckabee, Republican front runner and presumptive 2012 presidential nominee is getting into the education business. He has started a project, “Learn Our History,” where on a monthly basis–sort of like BMG or Columbia House music–Huckabee’s organization will send subscribers Time Travel Academy, an animated children’s cartoon featuring a group of intrepid time travelers who teach lessons about U.S. history “without a political bias.”

If judged by its artistic qualities, the cartoon is so poorly done as to be a pitiable joke. Its main characters are a contrived group of multicultural “tweens.” The history is predictable: Ronald Reagan is America’s savior, America is a Judeo-Christian country preordained by God to be exceptional, and flag-waving jingoistic nationalism is a virtue and never a sin. The guiding principle of this right-wing approved version of U.S. history is simple: “What we see and hear isn’t always the same as what we read in books, or see on TV. We know the truth. And that’s good enough for us.”

The takeaway here is simple. The “liberals,” a cabal that ostensibly holds sway over public schools and universities, are corrupt and anti-American. In their fantasy, conservatives have access to a quasi-secret, pure and unadulterated version of history that is only available to true believers. The Right is the proverbial keeper of the flame. They are obligated, through a gospel of sorts, to both protect and share this “correct,” self-validating (and quite inaccurate) version of American history with all who will listen — and they’re using education and the media to do it.

The Time Travel Academy is patently absurd. Huckabee’s effort at overt historical revisionism is part of a larger national trend that has been decades in the making. Here, conservatives are playing chess while the Left and progressives are playing checkers. To that end, the Right has developed a two-fold strategy.

First, they correctly understand that the educational system is one of society’s primary sites for political socialization. There you create citizens. The classroom is also where citizens are equipped with the critical frameworks needed to ask hard questions about the common good, their role in society, and the State’s obligation to the people.

Conservatives have made a series of bold strikes in politicizing the classroom in the service of their agenda.

1. David Horowitz, failed academic and incendiary polemicist, and his group, the Center for the Study of Popular Culture (now called the David Horowitz Freedom Center), have been policing college classrooms for years. They have compiled aMcCarthy-like enemies list of professors who are “dangerous Leftists” that “poison” and “pollute” the minds of young people by criticizing the pet policy positions of conservatives. Offenders who earn the ire of Horowitz and his organization are routinely harassed. Some have even been drummed out of their positions as college professors for being too liberal and “Leftist” for Horowitz’s taste.

2. The Koch brothers, the astroturf puppet masters of the New Right, have beenfunding academic programs and research centers that parrot the extreme gospel of trickle-down economics, anti-statism, and other policy positions that are favorable to the most extreme elements of the conservative agenda. Subverting the rules of academic freedom, the Koch brothers have also donated monies with the condition that faculty members support their policy positions.

3. Christian Nationalist pseudo-historians such as David Barton offer an uncritical view of American exceptionalism and the Constitution where the United States is portrayed as a theocracy beholden to Judeo-Christian beliefs. They have become darlings of the New Right and the Tea Party. A historian without credentials, he has become a mascot for popular conservatives and praised by Newt Gingrich as a preeminent scholar in his field. Barton has risen to fame on the backs of Glenn Beck and Fox News, who together pander his “righteous” and “correct” versions of American history to their audiences. As part of a cottage industry that features such factually challenged writers as Jonah Goldberg, their jackbooted and incorrect versions of history (synthesized by ideological pedants and hobbyists) have become the intellectual cornerstones of contemporary conservative thought.

4. The Arizona Ethnic Studies ban, along with the efforts to rewrite Texas school books to reflect a conservative view of U.S. history, are entry points for (re)educating children in a mold that fits the Right’s social and political agenda. In the age of Obama these state-level moves are designed to quite literally whitewash American history and to remove the successes of liberals and progressives from the classroom. In total, these assaults on education are efforts to propagandize the country’s youngest and most impressionable citizens by elevating conservative mythology to the level of historical certainty.

The second part of the Right’s efforts to remake American citizenship involves the media. Aided and abetted by Fox News and the right-wing media echo chamber, there has been a concerted effort to create an alternate reality that destroys the post-Civil War consensus and the social contract that has guided this country since World War II. There are many examples that demonstrate the deleterious impact of the right-wing spin machine on the American public.

Viewers of Fox News are significantly more likely to be misinformed about politics and public policy. This effect becomes more exaggerated the longer a person watches Fox News. Conservative pundits are more likely to makeerroneous predictions about political events. As documented by a range of independent media watchdog groups, Fox News and other right-wing outlets use the lie of the “liberal media” to disseminate factually incorrect information to their audiences. In a moment when political polarization is at an extreme, it is no wonder that conversations across divides of ideology and party are so difficult. Why? The right-wing media has succeeded in creating an alternate reality for its viewers. The consequences for Americans are dire: Any efforts to move forward as a community in search of solutions to our common dilemmas are damned because the basic terms of the debate cannot even be agreed upon.

The timing of these events is critical. The United States is at a crossroads. The Great Recession has exposed an empire built on a house of cards. Imperial misadventures abroad have left a hollowed-out infrastructure. The country is mired in debt as wealth inequality rises to unconceivable levels, the plutocrats earn record profits, and the average worker faces stagnant wages and severe unemployment.

As highlighted by recent polling data suggesting that the most die-hard Republicans want to split and form a third party, conservatism is in an existential dilemma. The symbolic politics of the age of Obama, when a black man is president of the United States, has triggered all manner of upset and madness on the part of the Tea Party GOP. The Right faces a set of changing demographics where their core constituency is aging and dying off (what social scientists term as “generational replacement”). And looking forward several decades, whites will no longer be the majority racial group in America. In total, the base of the Republican Party is in decline and their electoral coalition is facing obsolescence.

The Tea Party GOP’s search for a nominee to challenge Barack Obama has highlighted their bankruptcy of ideas. When not flailing about in the mucky waters of white populism, birtherism, and xenophobia, the positions offered by the GOP frontrunners are a laughable recycling of the failed policies of trickle-down economics, the Laffer curve, and an almost cult-like devotion to a belief that tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, in conjunction with draconian cuts on public services for the middle, poor, and working classes, are the only way to balance the budget and reduce the deficit.

Despite all evidence to the contrary–and warnings from responsible voices within the Republican Party about the dangers of “voodoo economics”–these tired ideas remain at the cutting edge of the Right’s vision for America in the 21st century. The irony here is deep: the Great Recession was caused in large part by these reckless policies and a devotion to “gangster capitalism.” Nevertheless, the Tea Party GOP wants to continue these policies as a means of saving the country.

Although culture warriors such as Pat Buchanan, and carnival barker pseudo-historians such as Glenn Beck would suggest otherwise, the forces of social and political conservatism have repeatedly been shown to be on the wrong side of American history. The triumphs of the Civil Rights, women’s and labor movements were high water marks for the country. While maligned by the New Right as near profanities, the long arc of American history suggests that the forces of progressive and liberal thought have expanded rights and liberties for the country’s citizens, as well as provided a more certain future in the pursuit of the common good than those alternatives offered by the Right.

For contemporary conservatives the solution to this dilemma is a simple one. When losing simply rewrite the history. Change the narrative. Then disseminate this alternate version of reality through the right-wing media and the schools.

This is the foundation of the Big Lie. The right-wing echo chamber offers a different version of the facts. In turn, their audience internalizes a partisan and ideologically skewed version of reality. Thus, shared solutions to the challenges facing the American people are almost impossible to reach because we as citizens are proceeding from a different set of priors about the nature of the problem.

The assault by conservatives on education is prefaced on a need to destroy those with whom they disagree. The Right has long identified “the Ivory Tower” as one of the last bulwarks that stands against their agenda. Because they have long prayed at the mantle of anti-intellectualism (see the appeal of professional mediocrity Sarah Palin to her “mama grizzlies” and the Tea Party brigands as proof) this is an easy move. The efforts by conservatives to privatize schools, destroy teacher’s unions, end tenure, and inaugurate a world where professors are all adjuncts subject to firing at any time (and compensated a pitiable salary) is the game plan to hobble their foes.

Collectively, conservatives want to create a class of consumer-citizens who are passive and ill-equipped to ask any hard questions about power, politics or society. The Right does not want critical thinkers or active citizens. Instead, they want to create drones who worship the market and live out a dystopian reality that is torn straight from the pages of one of Ayn Rand’s unreadable novels.

While Huckabee and company’s agenda may seem like child’s play at first, this is a real and deadly serious business. The Right is playing a deep game where they are remaking the very notions of citizenship and reality. What will progressives and the left do in response? Will they roll over and play nice? Or will they rise to the challenge?

The Right has been playing for keeps. The Left has been letting the fight go to the scorecards. It is time to step up and go for the knockout punch.

(Emphasis Mine)

see:http://www.alternet.org/story/150937/the_right%27s_%27big_lie%27_strategy%3A_when_losing%2C_simply_rewrite_history?page=entire

Was Torture the solution?

They were engaged in a desperate attempt to rewrite history — to argue that their methods of “enhanced interrogation” — provided the pivotal information that led to President Obama’s successful apprehension of Osama Bin Laden.

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From Robert, Huff Post:

“Last Sunday a veritable flotilla of neocon former Bush Administration national security officials flooded the zone on the Sunday Morning talk shows. They were engaged in a desperate attempt to rewrite history — to argue that their methods of “enhanced interrogation” — provided the pivotal information that led to President Obama’s successful apprehension of Osama Bin Laden.

Notable “experts” — like former Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld and former Vice President Dick Cheney argued authoritatively that “enhanced interrogation techniques” had provided the critical information that allowed Obama to find Bin Laden — eight years later.

Even though they behave like they have inside information, it is important to note that all of these former officials are exactly that — former. In 2008 the American voters had the good sense to make them former — since then, none of them has been privy to any thing more than the information that is available to the general public about the factors did or did not result in finding the location of Bin Laden.

That said, the information that is available publicly indicates that Khalid Sheikh Mohammad — the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, did in fact provide the “nickname” of one of Bin Laden’s couriers eight years ago. Khalid Sheik Mohammad (KSM) had in fact been subjected to repeated waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation.” The problem with their theory is that KSM did not divulge this information as a result of this “enhanced interrogation.” Apparently it was divulged many months later as a result of conventional methods. And the “nickname” of the courier was useless until signal intelligence allowed the United States to identify the real name and identity of the actual courier many years later.

In fact, the Obama Administration located Bin Laden because it re-focused substantial intelligence resources on the problem. It did the blocking and tackling of rigorous data analysis and painstaking surveillance. In other words rather than the bull-in-a-china-closet swagger and big talk that we heard from Bush and his team for years, Obama did the hard work necessary to quietly and effectively get the job done. Bush and company had failed miserably.

It’s pretty amazing that anyone would take Cheney and Rumsfeld seriously. Never mind that they diverted most of the government’s security resources away from the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks to their war in Iraq. Never mind that their “enhanced interrogation techniques” were used as the recruiting posters that enlisted thousands of terrorists bent on destroying the United States. Never mind that when they left office America’s prestige and popularity in the world had been squandered and was at an all time low.

Remember that just as in domestic politics, in world politics it matters if you have public support. That is especially true if the Muslim world continues its movement toward more democratic societies.

But in the end, the very fact that a coterie of former high-ranking officials are even making the argument that torture works is an embarrassment to America.

As a country, we need to emerge from this debate having placed the argument that “torture works” outside of the boundaries of acceptable political discourse once and for all.

In considering whether “torture works” the first question is: what do we mean by “works”? Torture has been used for centuries to achieve a variety of goals. It has been used to force subjects to tell what they know, to confess to crimes, to renounce their faith.

There is little question that torture gets a response from its victims. That’s why its practitioners find it “useful.” But that is also what makes its results completely unreliable. It isn’t hard for anyone to imagine that they would say pretty much anything to make the pain stop if they believed they were drowning, or if their joints felt they would break after they had hung by their arms for hours, or if they were repeatedly slammed against the wall, or if they had been left naked and shivering for hours in the cold and periodically showered with cold water, or if they had been confined in a small box for hours with insects. All of these were methods approved by the Bush Justice Department.

These are but the latest innovations in the tradition of ingenious, sadistic methods of inflicting pain and psychological torment. Over the centuries, torturers have invented machines like the rack to gradually tear apart people’s limbs. They have used rubber hoses to beat the bottom of people’s feet to a pulp. They have become adept at removing fingernails, and drilling on teeth without an anesthetic. They have learned to connect the exact amount of electric current a victim’s testicles or nipples in order to inflict maximum pain without ultimately killing the subject. And of course there has always been the ever-popular old-fashioned beating. While these were not on the list of approved methods, they differ only modestly from those on the “approved list.” All inflict excruciating physical or psychological pain.

It is precisely the fact that torture inflicts pain that makes it hard to believe the results of the intelligence that is gathered, or the truthfulness of a confession, or the sincerity of a renunciation of faith. That’s why most professionals who specialize in interrogation reject the reliability of the information gained by torture, and why courts throw out confessions obtained by torture.

That in fact is why we have the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution— to prevent the coerced confessions that were commonplace in 18th Century Europe. Remember, the Fifth Amendment is not just about protecting the rights of the accused. It is also about protecting society from the coerced, false confession that leaves the real criminal on the street…

Can’t the United States see that when we allow someone to be tortured by our agents, it is not only the victim and perpetrator who are corrupted, not only the “intelligence” that is contaminated, but also everyone who looked away and said they did not know, everyone who consented tacitly to that outrage so they could sleep a little safer at night, all the citizens who did not march in the streets by the millions to demand the resignation of whoever suggested, even whispered, that torture is inevitable in our day and age, that we must embrace its darkness?

Are we so morally sick, so deaf and dumb and blind, that we do not understand this? Are we so fearful, so in love with our own security and steeped in our own pain, that we are really willing to let people be tortured in the name of America? Have we so lost our bearings that we do not realize that each of us could be the hapless Argentine who sat under the Santiago’s sun, so possessed by the evil done to him that he could not stop shivering ?”

emphasis mine

see: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-creamer/did-torture-work_b_859859.html

Why is the USA running in the red?

outine increases in defense and domestic spending account for only about 15 percent of the financial deterioration, according to a new analysis of CBO data.

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From: The Washington Post

By Lori Montgomery, Published: April 30

“The nation’s unnerving descent into debt began a decade ago with a choice, not a crisis.

In January 2001, with the budget balanced and clear sailing ahead, the Congressional Budget Office forecast ever-larger annual surpluses indefinitely. The outlook was so rosy, the CBO said, that Washington would have enough money by the end of the decade to pay off everything it owed.

Voices of caution were swept aside in the rush to take advantage of the apparent bounty. Political leaders chose to cut taxes, jack up spending and, for the first time in U.S. history,wage two wars solely with borrowed funds.“In the end, the floodgates opened,” said former senator Pete Domenici (R-N.M.), who chaired the Senate Budget Committee when the first tax-cut bill hit Capitol Hill in early 2001.

Now, instead of tending a nest egg of more than $2 trillion, the federal government expects to owe more than $10 trillion to outside investors by the end of this year. The national debt is larger, as a percentage of the economy, than at any time in U.S. history except for the period shortly after World War II.

Polls show that a large majority of Americans blame wasteful or unnecessary federal programs for the nation’s budget problems. But routine increases in defense and domestic spending account for only about 15 percent of the financial deterioration, according to a new analysis of CBO data.

The biggest culprit, by far, has been an erosion of tax revenue triggered largely by two recessions and multiple rounds of tax cuts. Together, the economy and the tax bills enacted under former president George W. Bush, and to a lesser extent by President Obama, wiped out $6.3 trillion in anticipated revenue. That’s nearly half of the $12.7 trillion swing from projected surpluses to real debt. Federal tax collections now stand at their lowest level as a percentage of the economy in 60 years.

Big-ticket spending initiated by the Bush administration accounts for 12 percent of the shift. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars have added $1.3 trillion in new borrowing. A new prescription drug benefit for Medicare recipients contributed another $272 billion. The Troubled Assets Relief Program bank bailout, which infuriated voters and led to the defeat of several legislators in 2010, added just $16 billion — and TARP may eventually cost nothing as financial institutions repay the Treasury.

Obama’s 2009 economic stimulus, a favorite target of Republicans who blame Democrats for the mounting debt, has added $719 billion — 6 percent of the total shift, according to the new analysis of CBO data by the nonprofit Pew Fiscal Analysis Initiative. All told, Obama-era choices account for about $1.7 trillion in new debt, according to a separate Washington Post analysis of CBO data over the past decade. Bush-era policies, meanwhile, account for more than $7 trillion and are a major contributorto the trillion-dollar annual budget deficits that are dominating the political debate….

Most Republicans reject raising taxes as part of the solution; House Speaker John A. Boehner (Ohio) has called it a “non-starter.” But Democrats won’t go for a proposal based solely on spending cuts. The“Gang of Six,” a bipartisan Senate group dedicated to debt reduction, is expected to unveil a strategy as soon as this week that couples sharp spending cuts with a rewrite of the tax code that would raise additional revenue.

(The debt ceiling, set at $14.3 trillion, covers all federal debt, including money the Treasury owes other federal entities, such as the Social Security trust fund. The CBO data focus on the portion of the debt borrowed from outside investors. The debt is the accumulation of annual deficits; if annual budgets are in surplus, the nation can pay down the debt.)

The annual surpluses that set the nation on this course emerged in the final years of the Clinton administration. In the typical American household, a surplus comes as welcome news. But the White House is not a typical household. When Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin saw the budget shift into the black in 1998, he immediately warned President Bill Clinton that, politically, it was a mixed blessing.

Rubin wanted to use the surplus to start repaying the debt, which was then just more than $3 trillion. The White House billed it as “saving Social Security first,” viewing the surplus as an opportunity to shore up the nation’s finances before huge numbers of the baby boom generation began claiming federal retirement benefits. “The problem was a whole other part of the political spectrum wanted to use the surplus for tax cuts,” Rubin said in an interview. “They said they wanted to give the people back their money. Of course, it was also the people’s debt.”

What to do with the surplus became a central issue of the 2000 presidential campaign, with Vice President Al Gore arguing that much of it should be put in a “lockbox” to protect Social Security and Medicare. Bush pushed for a broad tax cut, arguing that taxpayers at all income levels were owed a refund. “Some say that the growing federal surplus means Washington has more money to spend, but they’ve got it backwards,” Bush said as he accepted the GOP nomination in August 2000. “The surplus is not the government’s money. The surplus is the people’s money.”

As soon as he took office, Bush pushed Congress to make good on his tax pledge. Less than a week after his inauguration, he got a boost from Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who testified before the Senate Budget Committee that “tax reduction appears required” to prevent the federal government from accumulating too much cash. Greenspan feared that large surpluses would turn the government into the nation’s largest investor, creating distortions in the markets.

A chorus of skeptics warned against spending the surplus. Some stressed the inherent uncertainty of the CBO projections. Others said a big tax cut would unleash pent-up desire in both parties to pursue expensive priorities without the pay-as-you-go restraints that had helped produce the surplus.

Congress approved a $1.35 trillion tax cut in record time. A second package, worth $350 billion, followed in 2003. Together, they constituted one of the largest tax cuts since World War II, according to the conservative Tax Foundation.

Bush’s first Treasury secretary, Paul O’Neill, resigned after the White House decided to pursue the 2003 measure. “I believed we needed the money to facilitate fundamental tax reform and begin working on unfunded liabilities for Social Security and Medicare,” O’Neill said in an interview. But the White House, he said, was focused on improving economic growth for the fourth quarter of 2004. “They wanted to make sure economic conditions were great going into the president’s reelection.”

Proponents of tax cuts argue that the legislation merely returned tax collections to their appropriate levels. They note that the CBO’s 2001 forecast assumed that tax collections would stay above 20 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product (defined as the total of all economic output) — well above the historic average of 18 percent of GDP.

“It’s not obvious that America was ready to have taxes at a level this high persistently,” said Donald Marron, a former CBO director who now heads the nonprofit Tax Policy Center. “Some degree of tax cutting was inevitable.”

But some key advocates of the tax cuts now say such a large reduction was probably ill-advised.

“Nobody would have thought that all these things would have happened after you cut taxes,” Domenici said. “That you’d have two wars and not pay for them. That you’d have another recession. A huge extravaganza of expenditures” for the military and homeland security after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. “You would pause before you did it, if you knew.”

Bill Thomas, the former House Ways and Means Committee chairman who helped shepherd the tax cuts through Congress, defended the 2003 package as “fuel for the economy.” But he said in an interview that the 2001 measure was larded with “stuff that I was not all that wild about,” including bipartisan priorities such as a big increase in the child tax credit and a break for married couples — provisions Thomas believes did little to promote economic growth and amounted to “throwing money out the window.”

“I couldn’t do anything about it,” said Thomas, a California Republican who retired in 2006. “You’re the candy man when you advocate those kinds of tax cuts.”

In the end, Bush cut taxes and spent more money. Good times masked the impact, as surging tax revenues reduced the size of year-to-year deficits during the first three years of his second term. But after the economy collapsed during Bush’s final year in office, deficits — and therefore the debt — began to explode as Obama sought to revive economic activity with more tax cuts and federal spending.

Today, the CBO forecasts are unrelievedly gloomy, showing huge deficits essentially forever. As policymakers grapple with the legacy of the past decade, a demographic wave of senior citizens is crashing at their doorstep, driving up the cost of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

William Hoagland, who was for years a top budget aide to Domenici and other GOP Senate leaders, said it is simplistic to think today’s fiscal problems began just 10 years ago. In 1976, as a young CBO analyst, Hoagland produced a long-term simulation that showed entitlement costs gradually overwhelming the rest of the federal budget.

“This situation really goes back to long before [the Bush administration], which is to say to old dead men that have long left the Congress,” he said.

Still, Hoagland said, the abandonment of fiscal discipline in the wake of the surpluses clearly didn’t help. “Nobody pushed for paying for this stuff,” he said. Not even after “it became very clear in the middle of 2003 that the line had turned on us. And the surpluses as far as the eye could see were no longer there.”

Emphasis Mine

See:http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/running-in-the-red-how-the-us-on-the-road-to-surplus-detoured-to-massive-debt/2011/04/28/AFFU7rNF_story.html?nl_headlines

Some Taxes are Too Low!

One cannot complain about negative cash flow when they ignore the opportunity to increase revenue.

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One cannot complain about negative cash flow when they ignore the opportunity to increase revenue.  (CFP)

From Portside:

“Why I’m Right About Raising Taxes on the Very Rich.

By Robert Reich
www.robertreich.org
February 15, 2011

http://robertreich.org/

My proposal to raise the marginal tax to 70 percent on
incomes over $15 million, to 60 percent on incomes between $5
million and $15 million, and to 50 percent on incomes between
$500,000 and $5 million, has generated considerable debate.
Some progressives think it’s pie-in-the-sky. Here, for
example, is Andrew Leonard, a staff writer for Salon:

A 70 percent tax bracket for the richest Americans is
pure fantasy – even suggesting it represents such a
fundamental disconnect with the world as it exists today
that it is hard to see why it should be taken seriously.
I would be deeply worried about the sanity of a
Democratic president who proposed such a thing.

Fantasy? I don’t know Mr. Leonard’s age but perhaps he could
be forgiven for not knowing that between the late 1940s and
1980 America’s highest marginal rate averaged above 70
percent. Under Republican President Dwight Eisenhower it was
91 percent. Not until the 1980s under Ronald Reagan was it slashed
28 percent.

Incidentally, during these years the nation’s pre-tax income
was far less concentrated at the top than it is now. In the
mid-1970s, for example, the top 1 percent got around 9
percent of total income. By 2007, they got 23.5 percent. So
if anything, the argument for a higher marginal tax should be
even more realistic now than it was during the days when it
was taken for granted.

A disconnect with the world as it exists today? That’s
exactly the point of proposing it. For years progressives
have whined that Democratic presidents (Clinton, followed by
Obama) compromise with Republicans while Republican
presidents (Reagan through W) stand their ground – with the
result that the center of political debate has moved steadily
rightward. That’s the reason the world exists the way it does
today. Isn’t it about time progressives had the courage of
our conviction and got behind what we believe in, in the hope
of moving the debate back to where it was?

Would a Democratic president be insane to propose such a
thing? Not at all. In fact, polls show an increasing portion
of the electorate angry with an insider “establishment” – on
Wall Street, in corporate suites, and in Washington – that’s
been feathering its nest at the expense of the public. The
Tea Party is but one manifestation of a widening perception
that the game is rigged in favor of the rich and powerful.

More importantly, it will soon become evident to most
Americans that the only way to reduce the budget deficit,
preserve programs deemed essential by the middle class, and
not raise taxes on the middle, is to tax the top.

In fact, a Democratic president should propose a major
permanent tax reduction on the middle class and working
class. I suspect most of the public would find this
attractive. But here again, the only way to accomplish this
without busting the bank is to raise taxes on the rich.

Republicans have done a masterful job over the last thirty
years convincing the public that any tax increase on the top
is equivalent to a tax increase on everyone – selling the
snake oil of “trickle down economics” and the patent lie that
most middle-class people will eventually become millionaires.
A Democratic president would do well to rebut these
falsehoods by proposing a truly progressive tax.

Will the rich avoid it? Other critics of my proposal say
there’s no way to have a truly progressive tax because the
rich will always find ways to avoid it by means of clever
accountants and tax attorneys. But this argument proves too
much. Regardless of where the highest marginal tax rate is
set, the rich will always manage to reduce what they owe.
During the 1950s, when it was 91 percent, they exploited
loopholes and deductions that as a practical matter reduced
the effective top rate 50 to 60 percent. Yet that’s still
substantial by today’s standards. The lesson is government
should aim high, expecting that well-paid accountants will
reduce whatever the rich owe.

Besides, the argument that the nation shouldn’t impose an
obligation on the rich because they can wiggle out of it is
an odd one. Taken to its logical extreme it would suggest we
allow them to do whatever antisocial act they wish – grand
larceny, homicide, or plunder – because they can always
manage to avoid responsibility for it.

Some critics worry that if the marginal tax is raised too
high, the very rich will simply take their money to a more
hospitable jurisdiction. That’s surely possible. Some already
do. But paying taxes is a central obligation of citizenship.
Those who take their money abroad in an effort to avoid
paying American taxes should lose their American citizenship.

Finally, there are some who say my proposal doesn’t stand a
chance because the rich have too much political power. It’s
true that as income and wealth have moved to the top,
political clout has risen to the top as well.

But to succumb to cynicism about the possibility of
progressive change because of the power of those at the top
is to give up the battle before it’s even started.”

Emphasis Mine.

___________________________________________

02 Nov 2010: a day that shall live in infamy

I predict that the new “Republican revival” will burn brightly for a brief moment and flame out like a sparkler.

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From Creamer: (HuffPost)

“…

What caused this disaster? First let’s talk about what didn’t cause Democratic defeat.

The Republicans will argue that their electoral success represented a ringing rebuke of progressive policies and values — and a popular renunciation of the Obama administration. That reading of this election would be completely wrong.

The polling shows that Americans still very much support Social Security and Medicare and want nothing to do with the Ryan “roadmap” that would privatize Social Security, eliminate Medicare and replace it with vouchers.

Americans support Wall Street reform and the reject attempts to allow the big banks to return to the recklessness that cost eight million Americans their jobs.

Americans do not favor eliminating the new law that prevents insurance companies from discriminating against people with pre-existing conditions.

Americans favor more investment in education, good public schools, money spent on infrastructure and spending by the government that creates new jobs.

Why then did they buy the Republican sales pitch and once again hand them the gavel of the House?

Two reasons:

1). It’s the economy stupid. Middle class Americans are frightened and angry. For two decades the largest corporations and the big Wall Street banks have, in effect, waged war on the middle class. They have siphoned off every bit of economic growth for themselves. They have left middle class incomes stagnant, and made it more and more difficult for many families to believe in the American dream that their kids will be better off than they were.

The voters threw out George Bush and the Republicans two years ago because of the economy, and yesterday they took out their frustration on Democrats in Congress.

If the recession had not been so deep, if we had been able to pass a larger stimulus, if circumstances had allowed the administration to preside over the creation of three or four million jobs over the last two years, the right would not have found the fertile soil in which to grow its Tea Party.

In the end, the wide spread popular anger and frustration is about the economy.

2). The ferocious counter attack by Wall Street and the corporate special interests worked.

When the President and Democrats in Congress were forced to confront the worst economic downturn in 60 years — a downturn that was caused by the actions of Wall Street and the same crowd that has made war on the middle class — progressives fought for — and won historic legislation to rein in the power of the insurance companies, and the big Wall Street banks.

Those actions provoked a furious counter assault by corporate special interests — that included their use of unprecedented amounts of secret and foreign money — to take back control of the House and stop the president’s agenda. Those actions were not a political “mistake” as some will no doubt try to describe them. They were necessary to lay the foundation for long term, widely shared prosperity and short term economic recovery. But they involved major short term political cost. Many Democrats knew the potential political risk and decided do it anyway.

But it turned out that you can’t be out-communicated seven or eight to one for months on end and not expect negative attacks to take their toll.

Some might argue that Democrats could have done a better job taking the offense. In fact many of them did, but often they were drowned out by the massive fusillade of corporate advertising.

In this election, the Empire struck back. Or I suppose you could be that the right wingers on the Supreme Court struck back by reversing a hundred years of American law and deciding that corporations had the same rights a people to “free speech” and could spend any amount to manipulate the outcome of American elections.

Of course the irony is that the same forces that created the economic crisis, and profited from it, then turned around and played off the fear that the crisis created to convince voters to turnout Democrats who had stood up to them and reined them in.

So what do we do now?

  • First and foremost we cannot once again retreat into a defensive crouch, nor can we allow ourselves to be beguiled by those who say that Progressives should become more “moderate”. It isn’t progressive values that the voters rejected. It was economic stagnation. Many Americans are not frustrated because the government has done too much over the last two years; they are frustrated that the government did not do enough to create new jobs. There has never been a time when it has been more important for Progressives to stand up proudly for our values and our policies — including health care and Wall Street reform, Social Security.
  • And we must be unwavering in our faith that while fighting for what is truly good for everyday Americans may provoke a successful short term reaction by the corporate special interests — and involve short term political cost — in the end it is not only the right thing to do, it is good politics as well. Standing up for universal health care, and widely shared economic growth, and education, and scientific research, and human rights is about being on the right side of history. In the long run that is always good politics.
  • We must make certain that the Republicans are forced to confront the hypocrisy of their own positions — beginning immediately. In particular we should start by challenging them about how they intend square their frantic concern for deficits during the campaign with their proposal to raise the deficit in order to give millionaires a $700 billion tax cut. That issue will be front and center on the agenda of the upcoming lame duck session of Congress. And we must draw a line in the sand and say no to any attempt to cut Social Security or Medicare or to free the insurance companies from the restraints that were placed on their rates and practices by the new health care reform bill.
  • We must go to war to improve the American economy — and even if we cannot pass them all, we should propose real solutions and fight for them — including a major public works program that puts people to work and primes the national economic pump.Over the next two years it is critical that increasing numbers of Americans come to believe that their lives — and those of their children — are improving. And just as important they need to see Democrats fighting for their jobs.
  • Democrats in the Senate should move to change the filibuster rules that have been used continuously to ham string President Obama and his agenda. Over the last two years the Republicans have been all about preventing economic recovery and preventing the success of the Democratic Administration for their own political gain – even though the economic prospects of everyday Americans suffered as a result. That tactic worked. We should do everything we can to eliminate the weapons that made them successful at obstruction.
  • We must avoid the natural tendency to turn on our allies – especially the White House and Democratic Leadership. Many progressives would argue that if they had just been tougher… just listened to us … they would have done better in these elections.In some cases that is no doubt true. But recriminations and disarray among the progressive forces will only help to our enemies. Unless we want to return to the dark ages of complete Republican control, we need to make sure that President Obama is strong and successful. This election should make it crystal clear that if we do not hang together, we will all hang separately.
  • Finally, we need to remember that the political tide shifts rapidly. It’s not time to panic. It’s time to be resolute. It was only nineteen months ago that three million people came to the Capitol Mall to witness the changing of the political guard and the Republicans were in the political equivalent of Siberia. When the Republicans took back the House in 1994 it was partially in response to a backlash from the wealthy over Clinton’s increase in taxes for the rich that created a Federal budget surplus and set the stage for the most prosperous period in human history. Clinton, let us recall, was overwhelming reelected just two years after that first “Republican Revolution”.

It will not take long for the voters to see that some of them were sold snake oil by Republicans who feigned their concern of everyday Americans and all the while are entirely beholden to the corporate special interests that they detest.
I predict that the new “Republican revival” will burn brightly for a brief moment and flame out like a sparkler.

Robert Creamer is a long-time political organizer and strategist, and author of the recent book: “Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win,” available on amazon.com.

Emphasis mine

see:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-creamer/what-yesterdays-election_b_778101.html

Eight Nasty right wing lies about Obama

The public has been misled on a ton of issues like tax cuts, the deficit, the economy, and the cost of health care.

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From Alternet:

“The public has been misled on a ton of issues like tax cuts, the deficit, the economy, and the cost of health care.

There are a number things the public “knows” as we head into the election that are just false. If people elect leaders based on false information, the things those leaders do in office will not be what the public expects or needs.”

Here are eight of the biggest myths:

“1) President Obama tripled the deficit.

Reality: Bush’s last budgethad a $1.416 trillion deficit. Obama’s first budgetreduced that to $1.29 trillion.

2) President Obama raised taxes, which hurt the economy.

Reality: Obama cut taxes. 40% of the “stimulus” was wasted on tax cuts which only create debt, which is why it was so much less effective than it could have been.

3) President Obama bailed out the banks.

Reality: While many people conflate the “stimulus” with the bank bailouts, the bank bailouts were requested by President Bush and his Treasury Secretary, former Goldman Sachs CEO Henry Paulson. (Paulson also wanted the bailoutsto be “non-reviewable by any court or any agency.”) The bailouts passed and began before the 2008 election of President Obama.

4) The stimulus didn’t work.

Reality: The stimulus worked, but was not enough. In fact, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the stimulus raised employment by between 1.4 million and 3.3 million jobs.

5) Businesses will hire if they get tax cuts.

Reality: A business hires the right number of employees to meet demand. Having extra cash does not cause a business to hire, but a business that has a demand for what it does will find the money to hire. Businesses want customers, not tax cuts.

6) Health care reform costs $1 trillion.

Reality: The health care reform reduces government deficits by $138 billion.

7) Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, is “going broke,” people live longer, fewer workers per retiree, etc.

Reality: Social Security has run a surplus since it began, has a trust fund in the trillions, is completely sound for at least 25 more years and cannot legally borrow so cannot contribute to the deficit (compare that to the military budget!) Life expectancy is only longer because fewer babies die; people who reach 65 live about the same number of years as they used to.

8) Government spending takes money out of the economy.

Reality: Government is We, the People and the money it spends is on We, the People. Many people do not know that it is government that builds the roads, airports, ports, courts, schools and other things that are the soil in which business thrives. Many people think that all government spending is on “welfare” and “foreign aid” when that is only a small part of the government’s budget.

This stuff really matters.

If the public VOTESin a new Congress because a majority of voters think this one tripled the deficit, and as a result the new people follow the policies that actuallytripled the deficit, the country could go broke.

If the public VOTES in a new Congress that rejects the idea of helping to create demand in the economy because they think it didn’t work, then the new Congress could do things that cause a DEPRESSION.

If the public VOTES in a new Congress because they think the health care reform will increase the deficit when it is actually projected to reduce the deficit, then the new Congress could repeal health care reform and thereby make the deficit worse. And on it goes.”

Dave Johnson blogs at Seeing the Forest and is a Fellow at theCommonweal Institute. He has over 25 years of technology industry experience.

EMPHASIS mine.

see: http://www.alternet.org/news/148614/8_nasty_conservative_lies_about_the_democrats_and_obama_that_must_be_debunked_before_the_election/