Category: Bipartisan Wet Dream

Pete Peterson’s puppet populists

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

Or, everything you really need to know about the sequester “crisis.” Mary Bottari in Common Dreams:

Fix the Debt’s stable of CEOs are a PR flack’s dream. Not only are they able to get meetings with everyone from John Boehner to President Obama; they can flood cable news with laughable messages of “shared sacrifice” and be treated with fawning respect. Fix the Debt’s David Cote, CEO of Honeywell, “brings serious financial muscle to the table” when he pushes “market credible solutions,” chirps The Wall Street Journal. There is no mention that Cote is a tax-dodging, pension-skimping hypocrite: Honeywell has a negative average tax rate of -0.7 percent and underfunds its employee pensions by -$2.8 billion, making Cote’s workers even more reliant on Social Security.

Creating a crisis is key. “America is more than $16 trillion in debt,” Fix the Debt’s website warns, calling it “a catastrophic threat to our security and economy.” The CEOs echo this warning, writing to Congress of the “serious threat to the economic well-being and security of the United States.”

But as Dean Baker shows, this talking point just isn’t true—and the inventors of Fix the Debt know it. Indeed, they have admitted it: former Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen, who is on the steering committee, has said publicly that the goal is to create an “artificial crisis” to get Congress to act.

To foster the illusion of a grassroots uprising, Peterson has nursed what the National Journal calls a “loose network of deficit-hawk organizations that seem independent but that all spout the Peterson-sanctioned message of the need for a ‘grand bargain.’”

In addition to throwing money at groups for national tours and town hall meetings, the 86-year-old Peterson is obsessed with creating the fantasy that young people care more about the national debt than their own. This time around we have The Can Kicks Back, complete with a mascot—“AmeriCAN,” a staffer dressed as a giant can—who in December taught former Senator Alan Simpson to dance “Gangnam Style.” This goofy press stunt went viral—Peggy Noonan labeled it “merry and shrewd”—and the group enjoyed puff pieces in The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times.
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Harry Reid: Piggie of the Week

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

If there’s one thing you can almost always count on, it’s the ability of the Democratic leadership to to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

And so it was that, after a full year of complaining and whining about Mitch McConnell’s duplicity, and expressing public regrets for not reforming the filibuster, Harry Reid chickened out.

Over at Scrapple TV, we were none too pleased with Mr. Reid. Please enjoy our little contribution.

BoBo

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

It always surprises me when I’m having a perfectly pleasant conversation with someone, and then they start praising David Brooks. Which tells me a lot of things about the person speaking, none of them especially flattering. I understand that to civilians (i.e. superficial followers of politics), he seems like a reasonable man, but that proves to me you really haven’t been paying attention.

Whee

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

Alternet’s Josh Holland:

It’s simply a hostage exchange. The Republicans gave up the fiscal cliff, and will now take the debt limit, the federal budget and automatic across-the-board cuts to discretionary spending (the sequester), and have another standoff in 2-3 months time. The deal wouldn’t have gotten 85 GOP votes in the House without the leadership giving right-wingers ironclad guarantees that they’ll have another hostage soon.


What leverage will the White House have at that point? They’ve already rejected the “constitutional option” to avoid the debt ceiling — and won’t mint a big platinum coin. The Bush tax cuts on high earners will be off the table. That leaves cuts to defense — which Republicans hate — and public opinion, to which the GOP doesn’t seem terribly responsive when its base is screaming murder and threatening primaries (which is always). That’s pretty thin gruel given that the “austerity caucus” thinks it has a good shot at cutting Social Security and Medicare as part of a “grand bargain” with Obama.


Other than that, we’ll only have the Democrats’ legendary iron back-bone on which to rely. Nobody’s ever gotten rich betting on that.

Caving on taxes?

~ susie ~ 6 Comments

Of course he will! Jonathan Chait:

The negotiating style Obama has displayed in these instances is what poker players call “tight-weak.” A tight-strong player avoids throwing in his chips, saving them for a big hand, which he plays aggressively in hopes of a huge win. A loose-weak player plays lots of hands, bluffing frequently. Tight-weak is the worst of all worlds – when you have a weak hand, you lose, and when you have a strong hand, you fail to maximize your position.


Obama is surely going to have to accept a lot of bad policies in his negotiations with Republicans (a fact I’ve argued to some of my harder-line liberals friends in several columns). But the tax cuts are the one area where he enjoys overwhelming leverage over the Republicans. Their only threat is to block extension of tax cuts on income under $250,000, a wildly unpopular stance countless Republicans have acknowledged they could not sustain for long without courting an enormous public backlash. This is the hand where Obama needed to collect all the chips.


Instead he is allowing Republicans to whittle down the sum by essentially threatening to shoot themselves in the head. And this is the most ominous thing about it. The big meta question looming over Obama’s term is whether he has learned to grapple with Republican political hostage taking. Hostage taking is not simply aggressive or even irrational negotiating. It is the specific tactic of extracting concessions by threatening to withhold support for policies you yourself endorse, simply because your opponent cares more about the damage. Republicans agree that the debt ceiling must be lifted, but forced Obama to offer them policies he opposed because they believed he cared more about damage to the country than they did.


Their refusal to extend the middle class tax cuts is the same thing – they support the tax cuts on income under $250,000, but demand that Obama give them other tax cuts he opposes in order to pass them.


Obama claims, and seems to genuinely believe, that he won’t let Republicans jack him up over the debt ceiling again. But if Republicans could hold the middle class tax cuts hostage, they’ll try to hold the debt ceiling hostage. Indeed, they will probably discover other areas of traditionally routine policy agreement that can be turned into extortion opportunities.


Obama may think his conciliatory approach has helped avoid economic chaos. Instead, he is courting it.

Matt Yglesias does not agree with Chait. However, it’s important to remember that any revenue Obama doesn’t get in taxes will be made up in cuts to social programs.

Harry baits Boehner

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

Apparently the plan is to bait Boehner into making a deal. Harry Reid went on the offensive today against John Boehner:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said this morning that it “looks like” Congress will fail to come to a deal to avert the year-end fiscal cliff, blaming the failure on House Speaker John Boehner’s “dictatorship” running the lower chamber.


“It looks like that’s where we’re headed,” Reid said. “I don’t know, time-wise, how it can happen now.”


It’s not exactly a surprise — leaders left Washington last week without any imminent signs of a deal in the making. But it’s a grim warning just days before tax hikes and automatic spending cuts begin to take effect.


Reid opened the Senate session by launching into a lengthy criticism of the House and Boehner, saying he “seems to care more about his Speakership” than making a deal on the cliff.


The House is being run “by a dictatorship of the Speaker,” Reid said. He accused Boehner of waiting until the election of the Speaker on Jan. 3 to get involved with negotiations. And he urged the lower chamber to pass the Middle Class Tax Cut Act, which the Senate narrowly passed in July. The bill made permanent all of the Bush-era tax cuts on incomes of less than $250,000 for couples and $200,000 for individuals.


Reid also slammed the House for not being in session on Thursday. He said that instead of being in Washington, Republicans are “out watching movies.”

Just don’t understand

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

All these people who think Obama was just pretending to cut Social Security because he knew Boehner didn’t have the votes.

Flashback to January 2009:

I asked the president-elect, “At the end of the day, are you really talking about over the course of your presidency some kind of grand bargain? That you have tax reform, healthcare reform, entitlement reform including Social Security and Medicare, where everybody in the country is going to have to sacrifice something, accept change for the greater good?”


“Yes,” Obama said.


“And when will that get done?” I asked.


“Well, right now, I’m focused on a pretty heavy lift, which is making sure we get that reinvestment and recovery package in place. But what you described is exactly what we’re going to have to do. What we have to do is to take a look at our structural deficit, how are we paying for government? What are we getting for it? And how do we make the system more efficient?”


“And eventually sacrifice from everyone?” I asked.


“Everybody’s going to have to give. Everybody’s going to have to have some skin in the game,” Obama said.

Also, lying.