Category: Class War

Trouble in paradise

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Oh my, sounds like lots of people have a real problem with Obama’s unwillingness to fight — and it’s going to cost him:

Reporting from Washington — President Obama’s advisors are confident that liberals dismayed by his agreement to extend tax breaks for the wealthy will forgive him by the time the 2012 election kicks into gear.

But the current backlash on the left may intensify the immediate challenge Democrats face in building a new campaign finance apparatus to challenge Republican-allied outside groups that flexed their muscles in this year’s midterm election.

Democratic operatives are already laying plans to set up new independent expenditure committees that can raise unlimited funds, and hope to enroll early contributors to establish a beachhead for the coming campaign. But some stalwart party donors are vowing to withhold funds because of their anger over the tax-cut deal.

“I do not plan to support Obama and his reelection effort,” said Utah-based hedge fund manager Art Lipson, who gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Democratic Party and its allies in recent elections. He views the tax-cut compromise as a giveaway to Republicans that will increase the deficit.

“He’s got many great qualities, but he is not a fighter,” Lipson said of the president. “I’ve met with many donors and the level of disappointment is extreme.”

Other discontented contributors are taking a wait-and-see approach.

“I would say I’m not a happy camper,” said Paul Egerman, a software entrepreneur in Boston, who said this was the first time he felt Obama reversed himself on a significant policy issue. “That troubles me. I need to be convinced he really had no alternative.”

Eroding Social Security

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

Yep. As to the “evil or stupid” debate: Who cares? Same results!

WASHINGTON – The tax cut deal that President Obama struck with congressional Republicans contains a provision that could ultimately be the undoing of Social Security, say Senate Democrats and backers of the old-age and disability program.

Obama, as part of the Democratic package, secured a roughly 30 percent cut in the payroll tax, from 6.2 to 4.2 percent. Allowing it to expire in a year will mean that workers will see a nearly 50 percent jump in payroll taxes as the rate reverts back — an event that will surely be described as a tax hike. The cut is estimated to cost $120 billion per year.

Democrats have never allowed the rate to be cut, even temporarily, in the history of the program, because payroll taxes feed the Social Security trust fund and create the political base of support for the program, said Nancy Altman, author of “The Battle For Social Security”, a history of the program, and head of the advocacy group Social Security Works. Republicans have won a long-sought victory, even as President Obama hails it as a win for his party.

Republicans acknowledged that the expiration of the tax holiday will be treated as a tax increase. “Once something like this goes into place, a year from now, when it expires, it’ll be portrayed as a tax increase,” said Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.). So in a body like Congress, precedents matter and this is setting a precedent. I think that certainly is going to create some problems down the road if it passes.”

The end to Clintonian triangulation!

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Oh, I’m sorry. There was a hiccup in the time-space continuum and suddenly I was back in 2007. E.J. Dionne:

A senior Obama lieutenant insisted that the president wasn’t attacking liberals. He was responding only to those condemning him as a “sellout” for a tax deal that achieves many progressive goals, at the cost of extending tax cuts for the wealthy and egregiously conceding billions to very rich people who inherit large estates.

Yet simultaneously, the White House also sent out signals that it was consciously casting the president as a centrist problem-solver in a new iteration of Bill Clinton’s old “triangulation” strategy.

This would suggest that Obama is perfectly happy to see liberals publicly furious, and happier still that some right-wing Republican politicians and groups, notably Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina and the Club for Growth, came out against the tax deal, too. There’s nothing like occupying the lofty heights of moderation, especially where Washington conventional wisdom is concerned.

Wait, didn’t the bloggers who swooned at Obama’s feet promise me he would be the end of all this?

But in the long run, is Obama capable of winning the battles with the Republicans that this temporary agreement sets up? By expanding the deficit, it will make it easier for the Republicans to push sharp cuts in all manner of domestic programs, including Medicare and Social Security. This accord will not stop Republicans from expounding regularly on “the Obama deficit” or from trying to box him in again on the tax cuts.

One House Democrat, who because he respects Obama asked not to be named, offered an unexpected case for the package that tells the president how much ground he has to make up with those who were once his most fervent supporters.

“If I thought they were ready to go 12 rounds on this next year, I’d kill it in a heartbeat,” he said of the administration. “But if they’re going to keep leaving the ring after the first punch, this is the best alternative we’ve got to keep this recovery going and helping those who are hurting the most.” There was no sanctimony or purism here, just a sober and melancholy realism.

We’re all Irish now

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Neither the Obama administration nor the Democrats are doing an honest job of representing us. They’re about to railroad this plan through, blow up the deficit, and then they’ll rush in next year with an “austerity” plan — you know, the same Catfood Commission plan that couldn’t even get 18 panelists to back it.

Shades of the Shock Doctrine — we’re all Irish now!

While Vice President Biden and House Democrats met into the evening, White House budget director Jacob Lew and senior Treasury adviser Gene Sperling held an afternoon session to field questions from Senate Democrats, who were more accepting of the package than they were a day earlier in a meeting with Biden, participants said.

“Members are more open today as they read the analyses of this package,” said Sen. Richard J. Durbin (Ill.), the No. 2 Senate Democrat. Citing prominent liberals such as John Podesta, head of the Center for American Progress, and Robert Greenstein, executive director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, who endorsed the White House plan, Durbin said, “These are people that progressives respect and go to, and they’ve said positive things.”

Durbin added that “I just loathe” parts of the deal, such as the estate tax. But, he said, “I understand the predicament that we’re in.”

Biden faced a far tougher crowd in the House, where a fractious caucus dominated by angry liberals is emerging as the bigger legislative obstacle to the tax plan. During a two-hour meeting, dozens of lawmakers lined up to interrogate the vice president about the deal – almost all of them speaking in opposition, participants said.

“There remain very serious reservations on the House side. I think that there’s still a very serious question whether this package can pass in the form it’s in now,” Rep. Chris Van Hollen (Md.) said afterward. Van Hollen represented House Democrats in bipartisan talks about the tax cuts that were rendered moot when the White House began dealing directly with Republican leaders, a slight that rankled nearly as much as Obama’s decision to abandon the long-held Democratic position of opposing tax breaks for the wealthy.

Many Democrats, including Rep. James E. Clyburn (S.C.), the third-ranking House leader, emerged from the meeting saying they could not support the package unless major elements were changed, particularly the estate-tax provision.

Most Democrats would prefer to renew the tax, which lapsed last year, with a 45 percent rate on estates worth more than $3.5 million for individuals and $7 million for couples. The Obama-GOP deal would impose a 35 percent tax on estates larger that $5 million for individuals and $10 million for couples for the next two years. If that change were made permanent, it would add $100 billion to deficits over the next decade, Democrats said.

In a forceful presentation, however, Biden made clear that big changes are not in the cards. “The vice president said, ‘This is the deal. Take it or leave it,’ ” an irritated Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) said, paraphrasing the vice president.

[…] Meanwhile, the White House embarked on an aggressive campaign to advance the tax package, issuing a series of announcements touting Democratic endorsements of the legislation. The list included Detroit Major Dave Bing; Michael B. Coleman, the mayor of Columbus, Ohio; Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm; Rep. Chet Edwards (Tex.) and Sens. John F. Kerry (Mass.) and Blanche Lincoln (Ark.).

In the Senate, lawmakers said they were warming to the package as they pored over the details of its provisions and reflected on the consequences of inaction: tax increases for virtually every American worker, beginning Jan. 1.

One of the first Democrats to sign on to the deal was Sen. James Webb (Va.), who is among 23 Senate Democrats facing reelection in 2012. “The proposal is the ultimate stimulus plan,” Webb said in a statement. “It will put more money directly into the pockets of people and small businesses, allowing that money to be quickly recycled as the economy expands.”

Lawmakers in both parties said they would seek to change the package through the amendment process. Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) said some conservatives are pushing a plan that would cover the cost of another year of jobless benefits – about $56 billion – by cutting spending elsewhere.

Meanwhile, a bloc of Democrats was circulating a proposal to add provisions that would trigger a broad deficit-reduction plan next year if the economy improved.

You know, I was just thinking that what we needed was the Catfood Commission! Great minds think alike, eh?

“There’s a legitimate case to be made for short-term stimulus,” said Sen. Mark Warner (Va.). “But if you don’t create a path to long-term deficit-reduction, you’re just borrowing $900 billion.” But he added that Congress must reach a compromise on the expiring tax cuts before adjourning for Christmas.

Worthless crap

~ susie ~ 16 Comments

In the words of Emily Litella, “Never mind.”

Never mind that I thought the rest of the tax cut deal was worth swallowing, because that was when I still thought there were 13 months’ additional unemployment benefits in the picture. There aren’t.

According to Calculated Risk, this is the same kind of “bridge” legislation we’ve seen before, in which people who were eligible for the next level of extensions (but couldn’t get them because they expired) are now eligible to move on to the next extension level.

It’s not another tier. There are no new benefits. You still can’t collect any more than 99 weeks. All it does is maintain the same system that was already in place.

Which means this deal isn’t worth a bucket of warm spit, as my mother used to say.

Arthur Delaney at Huffington Post:

The programs provide up to 73 weeks of federally-funded benefits for workers who exhaust 26 weeks of state benefits. The average weekly benefit is about $300, and the total cost of a yearlong reauthorization is roughly $60 billion. Republicans and conservative Democrats ostensibly concerned about the deficit impact of the benefits have blocked several attempts to renew them in the past couple weeks, but they’ve signaled they will relent if the benefits are attached to the even-costlier tax cuts for the rich.

Some 800,000 laid off workers have already received cutoff notices, and another 1.2 million will stop receiving benefits by the end of the month unless Congress reauthorizes the recently-lapsed programs..

So those of you who are running out of benefits, please curl up in your cardboard box and die. We wouldn’t want to upset the bond market, would we?

It’s simply amazing that the White House is allowing the press (and the voters) to think otherwise. I mean, does Obama think they won’t notice when their checks are shut off?

This is the same trick they pulled back in March, when I lost my benefits. The 99ers weren’t able to rally the troops because the media (and the general public) thought Congress had already approved additional aid, when all they did was fund the existing extensions.

Yes, it preserves the existing benefits. Well, why the hell shouldn’t they? Obama expects applause for this? In the name of common decency, this shouldn’t even be an issue. And in exchange for this emergency support, basic humane aid, we’re supposed to give away the store so that millionaires and billionaires can make even more money?

All this money for war, for banks, for big business, and nothing for the people getting buried by the economic fallout.

Bah, humbug. Time to look for a primary challenger.

And call your congresscritters today and tell them to reject this.

Jamie Galbraith

~ susie

Whose side is the White House on? You should read the whole thing:

What is at stake in the long run? Two things, mainly, in my view. First, it seems to me that we as progressives need to make an honorable defense of the great legacies of the New Deal and Great Society — programs and institutions that brought America out of the Great Depression and bought us through the Second World War, brought us to our period of greatest prosperity, and the greatest advances in social justice. Social Security, Medicare, housing finance — the front-line right now is the foreclosure crisis, the crisis, I should say, of foreclosure fraud — the progressive tax code, anti-poverty policy, public investment, public safety, and human and civil rights. We are going to lose these battles– get used to it. But we need to make an honorable fight, to state clearly what our principles are and to lay down a record which is trustworthy for the future.

Beyond this, bold proposals are what we should be advancing now; even when they lose, they have their value. We can talk about job programs; we can talk about an infrastructure bank; we can talk about Juliet Schor’s idea of a four-day work week; we can talk about my idea of expanding Social Security and creating an early retirement option so that people who are older and unemployed or anxious to get out of the labor force can leave on comfortable terms, and so create job openings for younger people who, as we’ve heard today, are facing very long periods of extremely aggravating and frustrating unemployment; we can talk about establishing a systematic program of general revenue sharing to support state and local governments, we can talk about the financial restructuring we so desperately need and that we’ll have to have if we are going to have a country which has a viable private credit system and in which large financial power is not constantly dictating the terms of every political maneuver.

We are not going to get these things, but we should have a clearly defined program so that people know what they are. And then, frankly, as was said earlier today, said most elegantly by Jeff Madrick, in the long run we need to recognize that the fate of the entire country is at stake. Its governance can’t be entrusted indefinitely to incompetents, hacks, and lobbyists. Large countries can and do fail, they have done so in our own time. And the consequences are very grave: drastic declines in services, in living standards, in life expectancies, huge increases in social tension, in repression, and in violence. These are the consequences of following through with crackpot ideas such as those embodied in the Bowles-Simpson deficit commission, as Jeff Madrick again outlined, such notions as putting arbitrary limits on the scale of government, or arbitrary limits on the top tax rate affecting the wealthiest Americans.

This isn’t a parlor game. The outcome isn’t destined to be alright. It will not necessarily end in progress whatever happens. What we do, how we proceed, and how we effectively resist what is plainly about to happen, matters very greatly for the future of our country, of our children, and of another generation to come. We need to lose our fear, our hesitation, and our unwillingness to face the facts. If we thereby lose some of our hopes, let’s remember the dictum of William of Orange that “it is not necessary to hope in order to persevere.”

The president should know that, as Lincoln said to the Congress in the dark winter of 1862, he “cannot escape history.” And we are heading now into a very dark time, so let’s face it with eyes open. And if we must, let’s seek leadership that shares our values, fights for our principles, and deserves our trust.