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Obama Budget Would Slash Community-Action Spending

Evans Liberal Politics
February 16, 2011

 

Obama Budget Would Slash
Community-Action Spending

Obama Budget Would Slash Community-Action Spending, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Government and Politics Watch, February 14, 2011, by Suzanne Perry, used with permission, quoted verbatim:

President Obama today made good on his promise to slash the Community Service Block Grants program by calling on the federal government to cut the program in half in the 2012 fiscal year, to $350-million.

In addition, nonprofit groups will be required to compete for the grants, which pay for projects that offer education, health care, housing, and other services to poor communities.

The grants are now distributed according to a formula based on the number of people in poverty, with most of the money going to a network of community-action agencies across the country that manage antipoverty projects.

Under the current system, Mr. Obama’s 2012 budget proposal says, those agencies are “not held accountable for outcomes.”

He proposes the money should now go to the “highest-performing community-action agencies so that scarce taxpayer dollars are targeted to high-performing agencies that are most successful in meeting important community needs.”

Mr. Obama signaled in his State of the Union address that this cut would be coming.

President Obama: A Disillusionment

Commentary by Evans Liberal Politics owner Paul Evans: Evans Liberal Politics has been a fairly steadfast supporter of President Obama, despite an ongoing series of basically un-liberal, un-Democratic appointments, legislation, and decisions. President Obama, now I say to you, you are going too far.

Pink: Dear Mr. President
Why Does This Video
Remind Me of You, Too, Barack??

Last fall I found myself deep in debt and behind on my electric bill to the point where the electricity had been shut off. It was early winter, really, the temperatures were dropping, and I was almost out of fuel oil, too. Community Action of Wooster/Wayne County came through with $600 in emergency HEAP funds for me, of which $250 went to get my electricity started again and $350 went for fuel oil so I could heat my house.

Now, in the name of appeasing the great slavering Republican beast, Obama is going to cut funding for Community Action in half. Thank you, Mr. President. I’ll remember this. Oh, God, let someone decent PLEASE challenge this President in the primaries. Mr. Obama, you are no liberal. Basically, you are a war-mongering, corporatist, Wall-Street grubbing excuse for a Democrat that FDR would not even acknowledge. Where has your soul gone, Mr. President? Where has the community organizer from South Chicago gone? So it’s this way, Mr. President?

I’ve stood up for you. My father and I authored an article saying liberals and all Americans should trust you. Now I have to ask, Mr. President: why should I continue to believe in you at all? Please don’t give us this bullsh*t about hard choices or the art of the possible or political reality. Mr. President, great leaders make the political climate, they don’t cave to it all the while spouting cr*p about bipartisanship. Wouldn’t even Ron Paul be better than what I see unfolding daily? Lord God, preserve us from warmongering Blue Dogs in liberal clothing. ~ Paul

See especially Have Obama and the Dems Sold Out the People, Too? (Revised and Updated), Evans Liberal Politics, January 17, 2011, by Paul Evans.

See Obama Budget Cuts Energy Assistance in Half, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Government and Politics Watch, February 14, 2011, by Suzanne Perry.

VISIT The Chronicle of Philanthropy.

Watch CAA may face budget cuts, YouTube News Video — 1:58

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Posted on February 16, 2011 by , 1 comment

America in Decline: Why Germans Think We’re Insane

Evans Liberal Politics
December 28, 2010

 

America in Decline:
Why Germans Think We’re Insane

America in Decline: Why Germans Think We’re Insane, AlterNet, December 26, 2010, by Democrats Ramshield, quoted verbatim:

A look at our empire in decline through the eyes of the European media.

As an American expat living in the European Union, I’ve started to see America from a different perspective.

Webroot Software Inc.

The European Union has a larger economy and more people than America does.  Though it spends less — right around 9 percent of GNP on medical, whereas we in the U.S. spend close to between 15 to 16 percent of GNP on medical — the EU pretty much insures 100 percent of its population.The U.S. has 59 million people medically uninsured; 132 million without dental insurance; 60 million without paid sick leave; 40 million on food stamps. Everybody in the European Union has cradle-to-grave access to universal medical and a dental plan by law. The law also requires paid sick leave; paid annual leave; paid maternity leave. When you realize all of that, it becomes easy to understand why many Europeans think America has gone insane.

Der Spiegel has run an interesting feature called “A Superpower in Decline,” which attempts to explain to a German audience such odd phenomena as the rise of the Tea Party, without the hedging or attempts at “balance” found in mainstream U.S. media. On the Tea Parties:

Full of Hatred: “The Tea Party, that group of white, older voters who claim that they want their country back, is angry. Fox News host  Glenn Beck, a recovering alcoholic who likens Obama to Adolf Hitler, is angry. Beck doesn’t quite know what he wants to be — maybe a politician, maybe president, maybe a preacher — and he doesn’t know what he wants to do, either, or least he hasn’t come up with any specific ideas or plans. But he is full of hatred.”The piece continues with the sobering assessment that America’s actual unemployment rate isn’t really 10 percent, but close to 20 percent when we factor in the number of people who have stopped looking for work.

Some social scientists think that making sure large-scale crime or fascism never takes root in Europe again requires a taxpayer investment in a strong social safety net. Can we learn from Europe? Isn’t it better to invest in a social safety net than in a large criminal justice system? (In America over 2 million people are incarcerated.)

Jobless Benefits That Never Run Out

Unlike here, in Germany jobless benefits never run out. Not only that — as part of their social safety net, all job seekers continue to be medically insured, as are their families.

In the German jobless benefit system, when “jobless benefit 1″ runs out, “jobless benefit 2,” also known as HartzIV, kicks in. That one never gets cut off. The jobless also have contributions made for their pensions. They receive other types of insurance coverage from the state. As you can imagine, the estimated 2 million unemployed Americans who almost had no benefits this Christmas seems a particular horror show to Europeans, made worse by the fact that the U.S. government does not provide any medical insurance to American unemployment recipients. Europeans routinely recoil at that in disbelief and disgust.

a homeless man sleeps on a park bench

In another piece the Spiegel magazine steps away from statistics and tells the story of Pam Brown, who personifies what is coming to be known as the Nouveau American poor. Pam Brown was a former executive assistant on Wall Street, and her shocking decline has become part of the American story:

American society is breaking apart. Millions of people have lost their jobs and fallen into poverty. Among them, for the first time, are many middle-class families. Meet Pam Brown from New York, whose life changed overnight. The crisis caught her unprepared. “It was horrible,” Pam Brown remembers. “Overnight I found myself on the wrong side of the fence. It never occurred to me that something like this could happen to me. I got very depressed.” Brown sits in a cheap diner on West 14th Street in Manhattan, stirring her $1.35 coffee. That’s all she orders — it’s too late for breakfast and too early for lunch. She also needs to save money. Until early 2009, Brown worked as an executive assistant on Wall Street, earning more than $80,000 a year, living in a six-bedroom house with her three sons. Today, she’s long-term unemployed and has to make do with a tiny one-bedroom in the Bronx.

It’s important to note that no country in the European Union uses food stamps in order to humiliate its disadvantaged citizens in the grocery checkout line. Even worse is the fact that even the humbling food stamp allotment may not provide enough food for America’s jobless families. So it is on a reoccurring basis that some of these families report eating out of garbage cans to the European media.

For Pam Brown, last winter was the worst. One day she ran out of food completely and had to go through trash cans. She fell into a deep depression … For many, like Brown, the downfall is a Kafkaesque odyssey, a humiliation hard to comprehend. Help is not in sight: their government and their society have abandoned them.

Pam Brown and her children were disturbingly, indeed incomprehensibly, allowed to fall straight to the bottom. The richest country in the world becomes morally bankrupt when someone like Pam Brown and her children have to pick through trash to eat, abandoned with a callous disregard by the American government. People like Brown have found themselves dispossessed due to the robber baron actions of the Wall Street elite.

Hunger in the Land of the Big Mac

A shocking headline from a Swiss newspaper reads (Berner Zeitung) “Hunger in the Land of the Big Mac.” Though the article is in German, the pictures are worth 1,000 words and need no translation. Given the fact that the Swiss virtually eliminated hunger, how do we as Americans think they will view these pictures, to which the American population has apparently been desensitized.

This appears to be a picture of two mothers collecting food boxes from the charity Feed the Children.

Perhaps the only way for us to remember what we really look like in America is to see ourselves through the eyes of others. While it is true that we can all be proud Americans, surely we don’t have to be proud of the broken American social safety net. Surely we can do better than that. Can a European-style social safety net rescue the American working and middle classes from GOP and Tea Party warfare?

Also See Top Ten Ways the Right Will Wreck the Recovery, Truthout, December 27, 2010, by Isaiah J. Poole.

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Posted on December 28, 2010 by , 1 comment

Abbreviated Pundit Round-up for December 19, 2010

Evans Liberal Politics
December 19, 2010

 

Abbreviated Pundit Round-up for December 19, 2010

Abbreviated Pundit Round-up, Daily Kos, December 19, 2010, by DemFromCT, used with permission, quoted verbatim:

Sunday opinion, the “America, the beautiful” edition. DADT is repealed, the public is way ahead of the Congress, and Republicans would rather discriminate against brown people and concentrate on economic wedge issues than help Americans move forward.

Webroot Software Inc.

NY Times:

The vote put Congress at the brink of a historic moment that some equated with the decision to end racial segregation in the military. It followed a review by the Pentagon that found little concern in the military about ending the ban and that was backed by Pentagon officials as a better alternative to a court-ordered end.

Backers of the repeal said it was long past time to end what they saw as a discriminatory practice that cost valuable personnel and forced troops to lie to serve their country.

“I don’t care who you love,” Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, said as the debate opened. “If you love this country enough to risk your life for it, you shouldn’t have to hide who you are.”

Mr. Wyden showed up for the Senate vote despite saying on Friday that he would be unable to do so because he would be undergoing final tests before his scheduled surgery for prostate cancer on Monday.

See also rec diaries by Clarknt67, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and TomP.

WaPo:

Even if the bill is passed this weekend, the ban on gays in the military does not end immediately, and military officials and activists continue to warn that gay men and lesbians serving in uniform should not make public declarations of their sexual orientation until the law is officially repealed.

According to the legislation, the issue would rest entirely with President Obama and top military leaders.

Jonathan Capehart:

At 11:49 a.m., the United States Senate voted 63-33 to to end debate on the repeal “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the discriminatory ban on gay men and lesbians serving openly in the military. The final vote (only 51 votes needed for passage) is expected to take place at 3 p.m. today, but there is no doubt this is already a victory. A victory for the Pentagon, which needs every able and valiant body to serve and protect this nation and its interests. A victory for the American people, who once again have shown the capacity to right a grievous wrong that ran counter to their fundamental sense of fairness. More importantly, this is a victory for servicemembers serving in silence.

Jordan Sekulow:

The outdated, unworkable “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” law will likely be repealed in the next few days. As a Christian conservative broadcaster, attorney, and activist who recently discussed DADT and my opinion about it on-air, I can say that for the most part, social conservatives are not enraged about the end of DADT. In fact, the grassroots has not been engaged on this issue for a long time.

NY Times:

Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand said Saturday that she and other sponsors of a stalled 9/11 health bill had won new Republican support for the measure and intended to try again to pass it before the end of the 111th Congress.

Following the Senate’s vote to repeal the ban on gays serving in the military, Ms. Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, said Democrats intended to resurrect the health initiative in the coming days after falling three votes short of breaking a filibuster against it earlier this month.

Frank Rich:

The notion that civility and nominal bipartisanship would accomplish any of the heavy lifting required to rebuild America is childish magical thinking, and, worse, a mindless distraction from the real work before the nation. Sure, it would be swell if rhetorical peace broke out in Washington — or on cable news networks — but given that American politics have been rancorous since Boston’s original Tea Party, wishing will not make it so. Bipartisanship is equally extinct — as made all too evident this month by the pathetic fate of the much-hyped Simpson-Bowles deficit commission. Less than a week after the panel released its recommendations, the Democratic president and the Republican Congressional leadership both signed off on a tax-cut package that made a mockery of all its proposals by adding another $858 billion to the deficit. Even the Iraq Study Group — Washington’s last stab at delegating tough choices to a blue-ribbon bipartisan commission — enjoyed a slightly longer shelf life before its recommendations were unceremoniously dumped into the garbage.

WaPo:

The irony of the DREAM Act’s failure is that it had strong bipartisan support at the start of the administration, and advocates thought it could generate momentum for more policy changes.

But as the country’s mood shifted on illegal immigration, support among Republicans and some Democratic senators evaporated, with many decrying it as backdoor amnesty for lawbreakers.

This is part of the GOP’s Just Say No strategy, the same strategy that brought us a kick in the face to 9/11 responders. The GOP bears responsibility. Hear that, media? The “flawed strategy” was trusting Republicans to do the right thing.

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Posted on December 19, 2010 by , 3 comments

Why Democrats Should Disregard Bill Clinton’s Endorsement of Obama’s Tax Deal

Evans Liberal Politics
December 12, 2010

 

Why Democrats Should Disregard Bill Clinton’s
Endorsement of Obama’s Tax Deal

Why Democrats Should Disregard Bill Clinton’s Endorsement of Obama’s Tax Deal, Robert Reich.org, December 11, 2010, by Robert Reich, used with permission, quoted verbatim:

Bill Clinton seems the perfect validator for Barack Obama — which is why the President is utilizing the former president for selling his tax deal. After all, the economy boomed when Clinton was president and 22 million net new jobs were created. What’s more, Bill Clinton was reelected — even though he lost both houses of Congress in the 1994 midterms.

Robert Reich vs. Ron Paul
on Larry King

But the analogy falls apart as soon as you realize Clinton’s economy was vastly different from Obama’s. The recession Clinton inherited was relatively small, and caused by the Fed raising interest rates too high to ward off inflation. So it could be reversed by the Fed lowering interest rates — as the Fed did in 1994. By 1995, the so-called “jobless recovery” had morphed into a full-blown jobs recovery. By 1996, at pollster Dick Morris’s urging, Clinton could proclaim to the American people “you’ve never had it so good, and you ain’t seen nothing yet.”

The Great Recession has been far larger, caused not by the Fed raising interest rates but by the bursting of a giant housing bubble. In 2008, the biggest asset of most middle-class people, upon which they borrowed and that they assumed would be their nest eggs for retirmenet, collapsed. Housing prices continue to fall in most parts of the country. The Fed has lowered interest rates all it can, and unemployment remains sky high.

Bill Clinton presided over an economic boom engineered by Fed chair Alan Greenspan, who felt confident he could drop interest rates far lower than anyone expected without risking inflation. The result was 4 percent unemployment in many parts of America, as well as the best jobs recovery in history.

The price Greenspan exacted from Clinton — and a resurgent Republican congress demanded — was a balanced budget. As a result, Clinton had to give up much of his “investment agenda” in education, infrastructure, and other long-neglected means of building the productivity of average working Americans. The economy enjoyed a huge cyclical recovery.

But the economy’s underlying structure remained as it had been before, including stagnant wages for most Americans. Within a few years the middle and working class was treating their homes as ATMs, borrowing trillions of dollars in order to maintain their standard of living, and at the same time demand enough goods and services to keep almost everyone in jobs.

Those days are over. The Democratic Party can no longer ignore critical investments in the productivity of average workers. Nor can it ignore the increasing concentration of income and wealth at the very top, and the inability of America’s middle and working class to get the economy moving again.

The GOP hasn’t changed their story or their strategy since the 1990s. It’s the fault of big government. That was false then, and it’s false now. The structural problems are now much worse, and the cyclical recovery from the Great Recession pathetically anemic.

If the Democratic Party has stood for anything over the years it is to maintain and restore upward mobility for the majority of working Americans, ensure that the playing field isn’t tilted in the direction of the privileged, and limit the power of the richest among us to entrench themselves and their heirs into a semi-permanent plutocracy.

Continuing the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, including a sharp cut in the estate tax, violates these core principles. Doing so in the midst of an economic emergency that demands bold measures to rescue America’s vast middle and working class adds further insult. For President Obama and former President Clinton to tell America there’s “no other choice” or that “this is the best we can do” — when Democrats remain putatively in control of the House, Senate, and the presidency — is misleading.

I admire Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. I advised the former and worked for the latter. They are good men. But they have either been outwitted by the privileged and powerful of America, or seduced by those on Wall Street and the executive suites of America into believing that the Republican nostrums are necessary, or succumbed Democratic advisors who think in terms of small-bore tactics rather than large and principled strategies.

I urge congressional Democrats to remember the larger principles — not in order to be purist or make the perfect the enemy of the better, but to move toward an economy and a society that we believe in, that reflects the needs of the vast majority of Americans at this difficult time.

Robert Reich was the nation’s 22nd Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton and is Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations. In 2008, Time Magazine named him one of the Ten Most Successful Cabinet Members of the century. He has written eleven books, including “The Work of Nations,” which has been translated into 22 languages. His recent book is “Supercapitalism.” For Professor Reich’s book page for Supercaptialism at Amazon, go here. Reich’s newest book, Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future has been released September 21, and is available for ordering at this link (Amazon.com). The above article is from Reich’s new blog, and can be viewed here.

Robert Reich’s commentaries are available for listening to at Publicradio.com. Watch the video Aftershock: The next economy and America’s future (about his new book). Thanks to Professor Reich for permission to publish his articles on an ongoing basis.

Commentary by Evans Liberal Politics owner Paul Evans: I agree with most of what Professor Reich has said here, but not with his overall conclusion. I don’t think that Obama did all that poorly in gaining this compromise with the GOP. Keep in mind, all Republicans would have had to do is sit on their elephantine asses to win these arguments. Of course we didn’t want to give in on tax breaks for the wealthiest two percent.

But we are living in a stratified society now with two classes where the wealthy plutocracy can dictate the agenda and also the nature of any compromises with progresssives. The GOP did not want the additional 13 weeks of unemployment insurance and fully eliminating the estate tax has long been on their agenda. Also, getting the tax break for all business investment was on the President’s agenda, not the Republicans. Reluctantly, and as an admitted pragmatist, I truly feel that this was the best we could do and that Democrats should support the compromise. ~ Paul Evans.

Watch Rep. Weiner Discusses White House Tax Cut Deal on Meet the Press, YouTube news video — 17:32.

Watch Axelrod Believes Tax Deal Will Pass, CBS News, December 12, 2010 — 11:12.

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Posted on December 12, 2010 by , 1 comment

Robert Reich: Obama’s First Stand

Evans Liberal Politics
November 11, 2010

 

Robert Reich: Obama’s First Stand


Obama’s First Stand, Robert Reich.org, November 10, 2010, by Robert Reich, used with permission, quoted verbatim, updated and with commentary by Evans Liberal Politics owner Paul Evans:

The President says a Republican proposal to extend the Bush tax cuts to everyone for two years is a “basis for conversation.” I hope this doesn’t mean another Obama cave-in.

Webroot Software Inc.

Yes, the President needs to acknowledge the Republican sweep on Election Day. But he can do that by offering his own version of a compromise that’s both economically sensible and politically smart. Instead of limiting the extension to $250,000 of income (the bottom 98 percent of Americans), he should offer to extend it to all incomes under $500,000 (essentially the bottom 99 percent), for two years.

The economics are clear:

First, the top 1 percent spends a much smaller proportion of their income than everyone else, so there’s very little economic stimulus at these lofty heights.

On the other hand, giving the top 1 percent a two-year extension would cost the Treasury $130 billion over two years, thereby blowing a giant hole in efforts to get the deficit under control.

Alternatively, $130 billion would be enough to rehire every teacher, firefighter, and police officer laid off over the last two years and save the jobs of all of them now on the chopping block. Not only are these people critical to our security and the future of our children but, unlike the top 1 percent, they could be expected to spend all of their earnings and thereby stimulate the economy.

Conservative supply-siders who argue the top 1 percent will stop working as hard if they have to return to the 39 percent marginal rate of the Clinton years must be smoking something (probably an expensive grade).

Their incomes of the top are already soaring (Wall Street is reading a 5% boost in bonuses, executive salaries and perks are back on the trajectory they were on before the collapse, and the stock market is booming), so it’s hard to argue much hardship.

Besides, only earnings over $500,000 would be affected because — remember — we’re talking about the marginal tax rate.

In addition, the Clinton years weren’t exactly bad years, economically, for the top 1 percent.

Finally, the Bush tax cuts didn’t trickle down anyway. To the contrary, between 2001 and 2007, the median wage dropped. And Bush’s record on jobs was pitiful.

The politics are even clearer. Over the next two years, Obama must clarify for the nation whose side he’s on and whose side his Republican opponents are on. What better issue to begin with than this one?

The top 1 percent now takes in almost a quarter of all national income (up from 9 percent in the late 1970s), and its political power is evident in everything from hedge-fund and private-equity fund managers who can treat their incomes as capital gains (subject to a 15 percent tax) to multi-million dollar home interest deductions on executive mansions.

If the President can’t or won’t take a stand now — when he still has a chance to prevail in the upcoming lame-duck Congress — when will he ever?

here. Reich’s newest book, Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future was released September 21, and is available at the above link (Amazon.com). The above article is from Reich’s new blog, and can be viewed here.

Robert Reich’s commentaries are available for listening to at Publicradio.com. Thanks to Professor Reich for permission to publish his articles on an ongoing basis.

Important: See Aide’s Comments Cause Stir as White House Discusses Tax Strategy, The New York Times, November 11, 2010, by Michael D. Shear and Jackie Calmes, excerpt quoted verbatim:

White House officials were meeting on Thursday morning with allies from several progressive organizations to discuss strategy for the battle over whether to extend the Bush-era income tax rates, and the session took on added interest after reports circulated that the administration might cave in to Republican demands on the issue.

David Axelrod, the senior White House adviser, caused a flurry Thursday morning after a web site wrote that he was ready to accept an extension of the lower tax rates on all income, and not just on the first $250,000 of income a year for most families, as President Obama has proposed.

But Mr. Axelrod and other senior White House officials quickly insisted that his comments had been mischaracterized and that President Obama remains opposed to a permanent extension of those rates at year’s end.

“I didn’t say anything we haven’t said before,” Mr. Axelrod wrote in an e-mail message.

Still, the quoted comments by Mr. Axelrod appeared to signal more clearly than before that the administration was willing to consider temporarily extending the reduced rates for all income levels, as Mr. Obama implied immediately after last week’s election. Unless Congress takes action, they are due to expire for everyone at the end of the year.

In an interview with the Huffington Post, Mr. Axelrod underscored the new political reality in Congress and stressed that the administration places a high priority on permanently extending the tax rates only for those families earning less than $250,000 a year.

Commentary by Evans Liberal Politics owner Paul Evans: Well, there you have it. This fight was Obama’s to lose or win. The political facts and public opinion were all on the side of ending the tax cuts for the rich. Yet Obama proceeded to throw away the political capital he might have won this fight with, and then used in the 2012 elections. Does Obama have no cajones? I think maybe we’ve answered that question by now. I know Bill Clinton wouldn’t have given up this fight on taxing the rich appropriately without a fight. However I am no longer surprised to see Obama cave like this. Too bad Obama. Too bad. Economic justice is important to me.

I feel bad for feeling so negative about the Obama Presidency. I personally worked quite hard for him in the 2008 campaign. Guess everybody’s a critic (even though I have no particular axe to grind here, unless it’s the general rule of fairness and economic justice). But I have to ask: is Obama a one term President? ~ Paul Evans

Recommended: Read Obama reportedly agrees to allow rich bigger tax cut than middle class, The Raw Story, November 11, 2010, by John Byrne.

See also The Fight Over Social Security’s Future Is On—But Which Side Is Obama On?, Common Dreams.org, November 11, 2010, by John Nichols and The Nation.

Related: Watch Obama’s Anger Problem, The New York Times, Opinion, Blogginheads, video: 4:20: "John McWhorter, left, of The New Republic and Glenn Loury of Brown University debate the idea that President Barack Obama should be angrier."

Watch/Read Obama Deficit Commission Criticized for Proposals to Slash Social Security, Medicare, Democracy Now, November 11, 2010.

Visit OurFiscalFuture.org.

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Posted on November 11, 2010 by , Reply

Abbreviated pundit round-up for Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Evans Liberal Politics
November 9, 2010

 

Abbreviated pundit round-up
for Tuesday, November 9, 2010

 

Abbreviated pundit round-up, Daily Kos, November 9, 2010, by Meteor Blades, used with permission, quoted verbatim:

Michael Gerson, the former Bush speechwriter, says:

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Even without a developed Tea Party foreign policy, the center of gravity on Capitol Hill is likely to shift in a Jacksonian direction. Historian Walter Russell Mead describes this potent, populist foreign policy tradition as “an instinct rather than an ideology.” Today’s [Andrew] Jacksonians believe in a strong military, assertively employed to defend American interests. They are skeptical of international law and international institutions, which are viewed as threats to American sovereignty and freedom of action. Jacksonians are generally dismissive of idealistic global objectives, such as a world free from nuclear weapons. Instead, they are heavily armed realists, convinced that America operates in an irredeemably hostile world. In particular, according to Mead, Jacksonians believe in wars that end with the unconditional surrender of an enemy, instead of “multilateral, limited warfare or peacekeeping operations.”

Shorter version: trigger-happy uncondiionalists return with a vengeance.

Devona Walker laments the 2010 election’s decimation of black congressional leadership.

Bob Herbert says it again because it bears repeating:

To get a sense of how deeply entrenched the problems are, consider what passes for good news these days. The economy added 151,000 jobs last month, which was more than most economists had expected. But even at that rate of job growth, it would take 15 to 20 years to get the employment rate back to where it was when the Great Recession began in December 2007.

There is no time to waste on plans that can’t succeed.

Thomas Sowell proclaims the coming politico-economic gridlock in Congress to be a good thing.

Jonathan Bloom says it shouldn’t be all that hard to stop wasting so much food.

Leonard Pitts Jr. takes aim at the death penalty as another citizen goes free by means of exoneration:

One hopes people who love the death penalty are taking note. So often, their arguments in favor of that barbarous frontier relic seem to take place in some alternate universe where cops never fabricate evidence and judges never make mistakes, where lawyers are never inept and witnesses never commit perjury. They behave as if in this one critical endeavor, unlike in every other endeavor they undertake, human beings somehow get it right every time.

Saul Friedman takes the cudgel to Fox’s “reporters” and argues for a return to the Fairness Doctrine:

No wonder that none is held to account for their radical views and, yes, their misinformation and lies. And no wonder they refuse to be interviewed by other, less friendly, reporters. Even one of Fox’s better commentators, Greta Van Sustern, an attorney who should know better, was compromised and lost any remaining credibility and integrity when Fox hired her husband as a political adviser.

Chris Good:

After CNN and MSNBC used the terms “referendum” and “repudiate” a combined 780* times last Tuesday and Wednesday as the Democratic Party got slugged around the electoral map like “Hurricane” Peter McNeely, President Obama has seemingly absorbed all this and recalibrated.

Is he any different now, from how he was before November 2?

We won’t know until we see him in action, responding to GOP requests and offering his own policy solutions.

Addition: fascinating like some kind of a ‘political sidewinder’: 12 takeaways from the Bush memoir, Salon, November 8, 2010, by Maxwell Strachan: "The former president’s book is about to hit shelves, but details have been leaking out."

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Posted on November 9, 2010 by , Reply

America’s Two Economies, and Why One is Recovering and the Other Isn’t

Evans Liberal Politics
November 8, 2010


America’s Two Economies,
and Why One is Recovering and the Other Isn’t

 

America’s Two Economies, and Why One is Recovering and the Other Isn’t, Robert Reich.org, November 6, 2010, by Robert Reich, used with permission, quoted verbatim:

Next time you hear an economist or denizen of Wall Street talk about how the “American economy” is doing these days, watch your wallet.

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There are two American economies. One is on the mend. The other is still coming apart.

The one that’s mending is America’s Big Money economy. It’s comprised of Wall Street traders, big investors, and top professionals and corporate executives.

The Big Money economy is doing well these days. That’s partly thanks to Ben Bernanke, whose Fed is keeping interest rates near zero by printing money as fast as it dare. It’s essentially free money to America’s Big Money economy.

Free money can almost always be put to uses that create more of it. Big corporations are buying back their shares of stock, thereby boosting corporate earnings. They’re merging and acquiring other companies.

And they’re going abroad in search of customers.

Thanks to fast-growing China, India, and Brazil, giant American corporations are racking up sales. They’re selling Asian and Latin American consumers everything from cars and cell phones to fancy Internet software and iPads. Forty percent of the S&P 500 biggest corporations are now doing more than 60 percent of their business abroad. And America’s biggest investors are also going abroad to get a nice return on their money.

So don’t worry about America’s Big Money economy. According to a Wall Street Journal survey released Thursday, overall compensation in financial services will rise 5 percent this year, and employees in some businesses like asset management will get increases of 15 percent.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average is back to where it was before the Lehman bankruptcy filing triggered the financial collapse. And profits at America’s largest corporations are heading upward.

But there’s another American economy, and it’s not on the mend. Call it the Average Worker economy.

Last Friday’s jobs report showed 159,000 new private-sector jobs in October. That’s better than previous months. But 125,000 net new jobs are needed just to keep up with the growth of the American labor force. So another way of expressing what happened to jobs in October is to say 24,000 were added over what we need just to stay even.

Yet the American economy has lost 15 million jobs since the start of the Great Recession. And if you add in the growth of the labor force – including everyone too discouraged to look for a job – we’re down about 22 million.

Or to put it another way, we’re still getting nowhere on jobs.

One out of eight breadwinners is still out of work. Most families in the Average Worker economy rely on two breadwinners. So if one out of eight isn’t working, chances are high that family incomes are down compared to what they were three years ago.

And that means the bills aren’t getting paid.

According to a recent Washington Post poll, more than half of all Americans — 53 percent — are worried about making their mortgage payments. This is many more than were worried two years ago, when the Great Recession hit bottom. Then, 37 percent expressed worry.

Delinquency rates on home loans are rising. Distressed sales are up as a percent of total sales.

Most people in the Average Worker economy own few shares of stock, if any. Their equity is in their homes. But with all the delinquencies and distressed sales, the housing market has a glut of homes for sale. As a result, home prices are still dropping. So the net worth of most Americans is still dropping.

And even though interest rates are falling, most people in the Average Worker economy can’t refinance their homes. They can’t get home equity loans. Banks don’t want to lend to the Average Worker economy because people in it are considered bad credit risks. They still owe lots of money, their family incomes are down, and their net worth has fallen.

And according to the Reuters/University of Michigan survey of American consumers, expectations about personal finances are at an all time low.

Inhabitants of the Big Money economy are celebrating Republican wins last week. They figure financial regulations will be rolled back, environmental regulations will be canned, the Bush tax cut will be extended to the top 1 percent, and it will be harder for workers to form unions.

Inhabitants of the Average Worker economy aren’t so sure. The economy has been so bad they’re angry at politicians. They showed their anger at the ballot box. They took it out on incumbents.

But if nothing changes in the Average Worker economy, there will be hell to pay.

here. Reich’s newest book, Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future was released September 21, and is available at the above link (Amazon.com). The above article is from Reich’s new blog, and can be viewed here.

Robert Reich’s commentaries are available for listening to at Publicradio.com. Thanks to Professor Reich for permission to publish his articles on an ongoing basis.

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Posted on November 8, 2010 by , Reply
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