Category: Meet The New Boss

The thinking at the White House

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Or what passes for it. Robert Reich:

Even though the President’s two former top economic advisors (Larry Summers and Christy Roemer) have called for a major fiscal boost to the economy, the President has remained mum. Why?

I’m told White House political operatives are against a bold jobs plan. They believe the only jobs plan that could get through Congress would be so watered down as to have almost no impact by Election Day. They also worry the public wouldn’t understand how more government spending in the near term can be consistent with long-term deficit reduction. And they fear Republicans would use any such initiative to further bash Obama as a big spender.

So rather than fight for a bold jobs plan, the White House has apparently decided it’s politically wiser to continue fighting about the deficit. The idea is to keep the public focused on the deficit drama – to convince them their current economic woes have something to do with it, decry Washington’s paralysis over fixing it, and then claim victory over whatever outcome emerges from the process recently negotiated to fix it. They hope all this will distract the public’s attention from the President’s failure to do anything about continuing high unemployment and economic anemia.

When I first heard this I didn’t want to believe it. But then I listened to the President’s statement yesterday in the midst of yesterday’s 634-point drop in the Dow.

At a time when the nation’s eyes were on him, seeking an answer to what was happening, he chose not to talk about the need for a bold jobs plan but to talk instead about the budget deficit – as if it were responsible for the terrible economy, including Wall Street’s plunge. He spoke of Standard & Poor’s decision to downgrade the nation’s debt as proof that Washington’s political paralysis over deficit reduction “could do enormous damage to our economy and the world’s,” and said the nation could reduce its deficit and jump-start the economy if there was “political will in Washington.”

The President then called upon the nation’s political leadership to stop “drawing lines in the sand.” The lines were obviously Republicans’ insistence on cutting entitlements and enacting a balanced-budget amendment while refusing to raise taxes on the rich, and the Democrats’ insistence on tax increases on the rich while refusing to cut entitlements.

These partisan “lines in the sand” are irrelevant to the current crisis. They’re not even relevant to the budget standoff now that Congress and the President have agreed to a process that postpones the next round of debt-ceiling chicken until after the election.

Oh boy

~ susie ~ 6 Comments

John Aravosis with a real doozy of a story:

From Ben Smith, who confirmed it from two sources, we learn that at last night’s “Common Purpose” meeting, a regular (supposed to be secret) get together between the White House and progressive advocacy groups (where the White House routinely yells at them, I hear), the groups got an earful about the President’s new deficit deal he reached with Republican Speaker John Boehner:

Yesterday, [White House National Economic Council Director Gene] Sperling faced a series of questions about the White House’s concessions on the debt ceiling fight, and its inability to move in the directions of new taxes or revenues. Progressive consultant Mike Lux, the sources said, summed up the liberal concern, producing what a participant described as an “extremely defensive” response from Sperling.

Sperling, a person involved said, pointed his finger backed at liberal groups, which he said hadn’t done enough to highlight what he saw as the positive side of the debt package — a message that didn’t go over well with participants.

That sounds oddly familiar. In fact, it’s the same admonishment a group of liberal bloggers received from then- vice presidential economic adviser Jared Bernstein on the one-year anniversary of the stimulus. I attended that meeting and wrote at the time, back in February of 2010:

I guess what struck me as most interesting about the meeting were two things. First, when Bernstein noted that, in trying to solve the country’s economic problems, the administration faces “budget constraints and political constraints.” By that, I took Bernstein to mean that the stimulus could only be so large last time, and we can only spend so much more money this time, because we’re facing a huge deficit, so there’s not much money to spend, and because the Hill and public opinion won’t let us spend more.

That struck me as GOP talking points winning the day, and I said so (Professor Kyle wrote about this very notion the other day on the blog). The only reason we’re facing a budget constraint is because we gave in on the political constraint. We permitted Republicans to spin the first stimulus as an abysmal failure, when in fact it created or saved up to 2m jobs. Since Democrats didn’t adequately defend the stimulus, and didn’t sufficiently paint the deficit as the Republicans’ doing, we now are not “politically” permitted to have a larger stimulus because the fiscal constraint has become more important than economic recovery.

And whose fault is that?

Apparently ours.

Bernstein said that the progressive blogs (perhaps he said progressive media in general) haven’t done enough over the past year to tell the positive side of the stimulus.

[…] In any case, this isn’t a coincidence. They actually believe, inside the White House, that we’re to blame for their problems. That they’re doing a chipper job and the public would know it, but for the Netroots and the liberal advocacy groups doing such a lousy job selling the President’s magnificent handiwork.

President Barack Hoover Obama’s editorial

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Oy:

Neither party is blameless for the decisions that led to this debt, but both parties have a responsibility to come together and solve the problem. That’s what the American people expect of us. Every day, families are figuring out how to stretch their paychecks a little further, sacrifice what they can’t afford, and budget only for what’s truly important. It’s time for Washington to do the same.

Actually, one party IS fairly blameless here: there’s a reason they’re called the Bush tax cuts and the Bush wars. This false equivalence is a crock of shit, and the president knows it.

But what really annoys me is this whole “Washington needs to tighten its belt just like American families.” Bullshit: if you want to talk about the need to “budget for what’s truly important”, you need to jettison those tax cuts the President extended a few months ago, and invest in jobs. And THAT, my friend, means deficit spending, just sensible deficit spending.

American families, when they need something out of reach, ALWAYS spends beyond its means. That’s what a home equity loan is. That’s what credit cards are for. Sometimes this kind of deficit spending is stupid, like when a person uses a home equity loan to go on a big vacation. But often this kind of deficit spending is quite well-advised, like when I refinanced my house to make some repairs (improving the value of my home for resale) and to pay off some high-interest credit card debt (dramatically lowering the interest rate I was paying, and improving my cashflow).

But Obama wants to “go big” on a debt deal. But he had the chance to do that a few months ago, and instead knuckled under to the Republicans, extending the Bush tax cuts. You wanna go big? END THE WARS AND END THE TAX CUTS.

It’s a revenue problem, not a spending problem. And the president surely knows this.

‘Not a preferred option’

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

So is multimillionaire President Obama is something different than a Third Way-loving neoliberal? I can’t wait to hear multimillionaire talking head Lawrence O’Donnell explain this one:

WASHINGTON — The White House on Wednesday closed the door a little more on the debt proposal being floated by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) [Ed. note: apprx. $17 million; wife Elaine Chao, board member of Wells Fargo and other boards, compensation unknown], a measure already under siege by conservatives.

“This is not a preferred option,” White House Press Secretary Jay Carney [Ed. note: annual salary $172K, married to ABC News correspondent Claire Shipman, believed to be $700K per annum] said of McConnell’s proposal in his daily briefing.

McConnell’s proposal for avoiding debt default — to transfer full power to raise the debt ceiling to the White House for the remainder of Obama’s current term, cutting Congress out of the process — does nothing to address deficit reduction, Carney said. And Obama is set on making sizable cuts.

“The president is firmly committed to significant cuts in spending and to dealing with our deficit and debt problems in a balanced way,” he said. “Bigger is better. … It’s an opportunity for a game-changer, to put the United States on much firmer ground as we really get into the 21st century and the economic competition that confronts us.”

You got that, people? This is from the White House press secretary: “Bigger is better.” You say “rope-a-dope,” I say “watch your wallets.”
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Chris Hedges

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Writing on why the U.S. is destroying its education system:

“If the Bloomberg administration can be said to have succeeded in anything,” he said, “they have succeeded in turning schools into stress factories where teachers are running around wondering if it’s possible to please their principals and if their school will be open a year from now, if their union will still be there to offer some kind of protection, if they will still have jobs next year. This is not how you run a school system. It’s how you destroy one. The reformers and their friends in the media have created a Manichean world of bad teachers and effective teachers. In this alternative universe there are no other factors. Or, all other factors—poverty, depraved parents, mental illness and malnutrition—are all excuses of the Bad Teacher that can be overcome by hard work and the Effective Teacher.”

The truly educated become conscious. They become self-aware. They do not lie to themselves. They do not pretend that fraud is moral or that corporate greed is good. They do not claim that the demands of the marketplace can morally justify the hunger of children or denial of medical care to the sick. They do not throw 6 million families from their homes as the cost of doing business. Thought is a dialogue with one’s inner self. Those who think ask questions, questions those in authority do not want asked. They remember who we are, where we come from and where we should go. They remain eternally skeptical and distrustful of power. And they know that this moral independence is the only protection from the radical evil that results from collective unconsciousness. The capacity to think is the only bulwark against any centralized authority that seeks to impose mindless obedience. There is a huge difference, as Socrates understood, between teaching people what to think and teaching them how to think. Those who are endowed with a moral conscience refuse to commit crimes, even those sanctioned by the corporate state, because they do not in the end want to live with criminals—themselves.
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