Category: Bipartisan Wet Dream

Hey, no big deal

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

Remember that most congressmen got elected because they were good at socializing and gladhanding, not because they’re rocket scientists. They deal in marketing and strategy, not reality:

In interviews with more than a dozen GOP lawmakers, the Republicans rejected the notion that Washington could default on its debt unless a borrowing increase is approved before Oct. 17. For the United States to actually default, these Republicans argue, the Treasury Department would have to stop paying interest on its debts—something GOP lawmakers claim is inconceivable.

“There’s always revenue coming into the Treasury, certainly enough revenue to pay interest,” said Rep. Justin Amash, R-Mich. “Democrats have a different definition of ‘default’ than what we understand it to be. What I hear from them is, ‘If you’re not paying everything on time that’s a default.’ And that’s not the traditionally understood definition.”

If this sounds familiar, it’s because it has been Republicans’ line of attack since their debt-ceiling battle with Obama in the summer of 2011.

Then, as now, the GOP argues it’s not the debt limit that would cause default, it’s Obama. The country would have the funds to pay its creditors if the administration would just delay payments to certain agencies.

Hoping to turn that argument into law, Republicans have touted legislation that would force Treasury to prioritize which bills it pays, pushing interest payments to the country’s creditors, as well as to senior citizens and veterans, to the front of the line and putting everything else second.

The measure makes for solid messaging—few voters are likely to disagree that Social Security and veterans’ disability payments should be top priorities—but budget wonks and financial industry experts criticize the idea.

“I don’t know any serious person who doesn’t think this will be cataclysmic,” said Steve Bell, a former Republican staff director of the Senate Budget Committee and now senior director with the Bipartisan Policy Center.

This is, of course, a wonderful setup for the Grand Bargain. We had to! To save the country! These Republicans just aren’t rational!

And this “no big deal” is the new talking point.

Negotiations 101

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

My old pal Hecate with some advice for the president:

So, I’m an old woman who didn’t go to HLS and wouldn’t presume to imagine that I could lead the United States. But I’ll still, as someone who’s actually been in the field, practiced law, and successfully negotiated good outcomes for my clients, presume to give Mr. Obama some advice.

If I were sitting today where you sit, Mr. Obama, almost at the confluence of the Anacostia River, the Washington Chanel, and the Potomac River, here’s what I’d do:

I’d announce that, now that the government’s been closed for two days, I’m unwilling to sign anything but a clean bill to fund the government, except that now I also want the Rapeublicans to approve all of my judicial nominees who have been languishing in Congress lo these many years.

Tomorrow morning, I’d eat breakfast, put on my nice suit, walk out into the Rose Garden (it’s gorgeous in DC this week) and announce that now that I’ve slept on it, I won’t sign anything except a clean bill with approval of all of my judicial nominees and statehood for DC. I’d wave to the reporters, go play golf (include a woman this time, Mr. President), review their homework with my daughters, and get a massage.

On Friday, after I had lunch at the Palm with my wife (have the crabmeat cocktail and the steak salad, rare), I’d walk up to Dupont Circle and say that I’d been discussing it with Ms. Obama and, now, I’m unwilling to sign anything except a clean bill with approval of all of my judicial appointees, statehood for DC, and a new bill of Elizabeth Warren’s choosing.

I’d take the weekend off, go to Camp David, let the girls and the dogs run around and enjoy Indian Summer in Maryland, have dinner with some crazy, wild-eyed liberals, and make sure the press knew who they were and what we ate (include arugula and craft beer on the menu).

On Monday, I’d wait.

On Tuesday, I’d give a speech and announce that, having thought about it over the weekend, in the calm of Camp David, I also need a new program of really strong controls on financial markets.

You get the picture.

Right now, the only people upping the ante are the Rapeublicans. In order to “meet in the middle” and appear “reasonable” Mr. Obama has to move towards their position. That’s no way to negotiate.

Rapeublicans who are watching the polls go even further down on the notion of shutting down the government (they’ve already crossed that Rubicon — another river reference — so what the heck), need some additional motivation to move towards Mr. Obama. And they need to see that continuing to hold out will cost them even more.

Maybe, in the end, Mr. Obama shows what a reasonable guy he is by compromising on a new bill of Elizabeth Warren’s choosing and half of his judicial appointees. That’s how negotiations work.

See no evil

~ susie ~ 6 Comments

Still. STILL people refuse to believe this is where it’s headed, “Obama said he won’t compromise,” yadda yadda yadda. Don’t they know how to parse him yet? He said he won’t compromise ON THE DEBT CEILING. He didn’t rule anything else out. Two weeks ago, he said he’d deal on entitlements. Why can’t people look at the ugly reality?

Most House Republicans privately concede they’re fighting a battle they’re unlikely to win, and to avoid a prolonged shutdown and a disastrous debt default, Washington has to create a package so big that lifting the borrowing limit and funding the government is merely a sideshow.
[…]
“I want to get a budget agreement,” Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) told POLITICO on Wednesday. “That’s what we’ve been about all along. So yeah, we think the issues are converging — [the continuing resolution] and debt limit — and from the get-go, we wanted to get a budget agreement to grow this economy and get this debt under control, especially before the Federal Reserve starts raising interest rates. I think it’s in our nation’s interest to do that. And that’s one of the things we’re fighting for in addition to relief from Obamacare — or fairness from Obamacare.”
[…]
White House officials remain deeply skeptical that a grand bargain can be reached as long as Republicans refuse to raise tax revenue. But there are fresh signs Republicans would consider new revenue if they are not raising tax rates, and key Republicans told POLITICO that they would be interested in some of the items discussed by Boehner and Obama in 2011.The collision of a number of factors has sparked renewed talk of a grand bargain.
[…]
So with government shut down and the debt ceiling rapidly approaching in the next two weeks a large number of Republicans see a grand deficit compromise as the only plausible way out.
Members throughout the House Republican Conference are sounding a new tune on a potential deal. Republican Rep. Steve Stivers, a close Boehner ally from the Columbus, Ohio, area, said “guys like me” would consider revenue in a potential deal.

“We’re getting closer to the point that everything’s intertwined — government funding, the debt ceiling and spending — and so the best way out, I believe, and the only way for everybody to find an acceptable long-term solution is a big negotiation of everything that includes something on entitlements, tax reform, something on a spending level and wrap it in one box,” Stivers told POLITICO.

Boehner to GOP: Grand Bargain in the works

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Here we go:

House Republicans tell me Speaker John Boehner wants to craft a “grand bargain” on fiscal issues as part of the debt-limit deliberations, and during a series of meetings on Wednesday, he urged colleagues to stick with him.

The revelation came quietly. Boehner called groups of members to his Capitol office all day, taking their temperature on the shutdown and the debt limit. It became clear, members say, that Boehner’s chief goal is conference unity as the debt limit nears, and he’s looking at potentially blending a government-spending deal and debt-limit agreement into a larger budget package.

“It’s the return of the grand bargain,” says one House Republican, who requested anonymity to speak freely. “There weren’t a lot of specifics discussed, and the meetings were mostly about just checking in. But he’s looking hard at the debt limit as a place where we can do something big.”

Beyond Boehner’s office, the leadership is sending out a similar message through its emissaries. The House GOP’s most influental fiscal strategists, Dave Camp and Paul Ryan, are privately reassuring nervous members that the shutdown may be painful in the short term, but a budget deal is in the works — and they should be enthused about what they’re cooking up.

“Ryan is selling this to everybody; he’s getting back to his sweet spot,” says a second House Republican who’s close with the Wisconsin congressman. “He and Camp are going to be Boehner’s guys. That’s why Boehner put them on the CR conference committee; he knows these guys are going to be his point men as this whole thing plays out.”

And during Wednesday huddles, Ryan and Camp, along with members who met with Boehner, talked openly about what kind of concessions they could potentially win from Democrats on the debt limit, should Republicans hang together. Per sources, entitlement reform, an elimination of the medical-device tax, and delays to parts of Obamacare are all on the table. Instead of fretting about the shutdown and getting mired in the press frenzy, the leadership and Ryan is working to help members accept a shutdown that may linger for weeks, but ultimately win policy reforms.

Ryan and his allies believe Democrats want a delay of aspects of sequestration and, of course, a clean CR and debt-limit extension. So, instead of making separate deals on each front, Ryan and now Boehner are looking at combining the different issues into a single pact.

‘Saving’ our schools

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

charters

Remember, money “invested” by hedge funders in education “reform” almost doubles its value in tax credits over ten years! So when they start talking about how much they care about the kids, keep that in mind:

Remember how some of us were saying that as soon as the “shock doctrine” of manufactured budget crises put the fork in any hope of reviving Philadelphia’s public schools in any way, that the vulture capitalists would be diving in to pick over the carcass?

Don’t bother, they’re here. In fact, they’re everywhere, they’re everywhere! When we weren’t looking, someone apparently decreed that Monday, Sept. 30, 2013, shall be hereby known as Crush A Teacher Day in the city of Philadelphia.

It only takes $50,000 to participate!

On Monday, wealthy donors interested in the future of public education will gather for a two-day conference at the Union League: “All of the Above: How Donors can Expand a City’s Great Schools.”

Attendance is restricted to those who make $50,000 in charitable donations per year. One might hope, given the apocalyptic state of Philly’s resource-starved public schools, that they are here to plot a campaign to reverse deep state budget cuts — or, at the very least, to cut a check to rehire some laid-off school counselors.

Instead, they will meet with self-described school-reform activists who want to move yet more students out of the same “government schools” they have defunded and into privately-managed charters — and even straight-up private schools. The entirely broke School District of Philadelphia estimates that each student who attends a charter costs it an additional $7,000. That existential fiscal challenge posed by charter expansion will not, it seems, be on the agenda. Nothing about the sector’s rampant corruption and lack of state or local oversight either.

The cast of characters includes some of the usual suspects: Jeremy Nowak, who caught a fever during his brief tenure as head of the William Penn Foundation, and the only way he can scratch it is with more cowbell corporate education reform, and something that calls itself Cities for Education Entrepreneurship Trust (CEE-Trust), that is basically funded these days by Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates.

The vultures are circling

~ susie

Charlie Pierce:

While all the attention is being paid to the suicidal skylarking of the Republicans as regards the Affordable Care Act, Richard Eskow points out that, in the mix right now, and trading on the preposterous notion that both sides are somehow at fault over this, the deficit fetishists are back. Even Messrs. Simpson and Bowles have rolled away the stone. They have their commission’s recommendations to wave around. The Fix The Debt frauds are wandering the Green Rooms. While all this scrambling about defunding the ACA is going on, it is very likely that the various cultists in Congress, at the instigation of the White House, might decide to start feeding Vaal again.

There’s nothing that leads me to believe that the president has abandoned his desire for a Grand Bargain, even if the political context within which one might be reached, has catapulted itself beyond the izonkosphere. It is the secondary deals that could be cut in this particular crisis — the GB, or our old pal, the Keystone XL pipeline — that are going to be worth watching. The side deals are where the real damage could get done and, once those side deals are cut, the damage is likely to be buried under a blizzard of Beltway platitudes about “compromise,” “bipartisanship,” and “shared sacrifice.” The fact that it is beyond indecent for the Democrats to join in the notion that cutting social spending at a time of grinding unemployment doesn’t seem to stop a lot of them from considering it. And, as always, it’s important to keep in mind the blog’s First Law Of Economics: Fk The Deficit. People got no jobs. People got no money.

Shut it down

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

I haven’t been writing about the impending government shutdown because it’s so depressing. For one thing, since they’ve been playing games with funding for so long, it literally does shut down everything. It’s much worse than when it happened under Clinton — back then, a lot of funding bills were already signed so it wasn’t a total shutdown. This is.

And they’re going to use it as cover for the Grand Bargain. (As Digby says: It doesn’t hurt to be paranoid.) It’s almost inevitable, and Obama handed them the gun to shoot us with. He set up the whole showdown. And this isn’t conjecture — WH economic advisor Gene Sperling admitted as much in a letter to Bob Woodward.

I don’t know how we can fight back. The Congress critters are terrified of extending the shutdown, they’ll grab at the first deal they can live with. And Wall Street will live happily ever after while old people die.

God bless America.

The president has other options

~ susie ~ 8 Comments

platinum coin
On the debt ceiling, even if he chooses not to acknowledge them:

Why not point out that if the Administration does not negotiate with the Republicans, it can still prevent defaults and shutdowns due to the failure to raise the debt limit? Is it because the President prefers a crisis atmosphere, and perhaps even a shutdown to prepare the way for the treasured “grand bargain” on entitlements he has been seeking since at least January 2010, when he appointed the beloved Bowles-Simpson Catfood Commission?

That there may be something to this, is suggested by two things happening this morning. In his address to the Business Roundtable, the President stated his willingness to negotiate with the Republicans on the budget on matters including entitlements, along with his unwillingness to negotiate with them on the debt ceiling. Since the issue of the budget and a government shutdown occurs first, at the end of this month, he is saying that he is willing to do a deal on the budget with entitlements on the table, if the Republicans agree to give him a clean debt limit increase bill.

Then later on MSNBC’s “NOW with Alex Wagner” during a panel discussion also, including Alex Wagner, David Corn, and Ezra Klein again. After Ezra once again repeated his apocalypse now framing of the debt limit crisis, Sam Stein emphasized that Obama and the Administration continue to emphasize a willingness to negotiate over the budget.

Sam Stein: . . . you can see the contours of a deal that would upset both parties but palatable. something like in exchange for changes to social security payments, cpi, chained cpi. you could get a reprieve from sequestration. something like that along the lines where both parties are like, well, we don’t really want to do it, but for the sake of making sure we pay our bills — that’s why the republicans keep going there. they know obama care defunding isn’t going to happen, but there are other hostages.

Alex: why does president obama come to the table at all?

Ezra: i think that’s the kind of deal they would come to the table on. they would consider that a deal over sequestration. i’m not sure if they would do that exact deal, but the two deals they won’t do are the ones the republicans want. they don’t want that sequestration deal. they want an obama care deal or a debt ceiling deal. they won’t come to the table on those. . .

So, Sam Stein thinks the zombie “chained CPI” lives again, and Ezra agrees, but also thinks that the Republicans will not agree to that unless they get the deals they want. So, once again, the right wing, through their intransigence, may save us from President Obama’s continuing insistence that seniors must suffer now, and future seniors must suffer as well, for the sake of an illusory long-term debt/insolvency problem that doesn’t really exist, and that he can dispel at any moment by minting a $60 T coin.

Meanwhile, the four Versailles “progressives” on this panel laugh at the stupidity of the Republicans who are marching to the doom of their party, while refusing to call attention to the fact that this “funding” crisis, and the previous ones since 2010 were and are all kabuki, since the President could and still can dispel the illusion of possible insolvency any time he chooses to use the power Congress has given him to mint that coin. The big $60 T one; just the timid TDC.