Category: Politics As Usual

New poll shows little support for cuts

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

Instead, voters want higher taxes on the rich. Imagine that:

The poll reveals that the public has little desire for an all-cuts approach to deficit reduction, and that by a 17-point margin (56% to 39%) it wants the next budget agreement to include new tax revenues from the wealthy and corporations, in addition to spending cuts. Independents favor a balanced approach by a 19-point margin and moderates support it by a 42-point margin.

The poll also shows that by a 40-point margin (68% to 28%) the public wants Congress to focus on both creating jobs and reducing the deficit, not to focus only on deficit reduction.

When it comes to what to do about the new $110 billion in automatic spending cuts, known as the sequester, which are set to kick in next January, the public by a two-to-one margin (53% to 27%) wants to see at least half of the cuts replaced with revenue from the wealthy and corporations.

And strikingly, voters overall support a proposal to cancel the sequester spending cuts entirely and replace them with new tax revenue from the wealthy and corporations by 16 points (50% to 34%).

“The poll reveals a public that wants any new budget deal to include significant new revenue from closing tax loopholes that benefit the rich and corporations,” said Geoff Garin, President of Hart Research Associates. “They do not just want a debate about cutting spending. The party that is on the side of a balanced approach will hit the sweet spot with the public.”

While there has been much talk in Congress about using any revenue generated from closing tax loopholes to reduce income tax rates, the poll shows that the public has almost no interest in this approach. Instead, by a margin of 82% to 9%, the public says revenue generated from limiting tax deductions for the wealthy or closing corporate tax loopholes should be used for public investments and deficit reduction.

Democracy!

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

I am shocked, shocked that the right wing would hide behind these organizations for their nefarious purposes:

Twelve new reports released today expose the State Policy Network (SPN), an $83 million web of right-wing “think tanks” in every state across the country. Although SPN’s member organizations claim to be nonpartisan and independent, an in-depth investigation reveals that SPN and its state affiliatesare major drivers of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)-backed corporate agenda in state houses nationwide, with deep ties to the Koch brothers and the national right-wing network of funders. The reports show how these groups masquerade as “think tanks,” and describe how some of them may be skirting tax laws while really orchestrating extensive lobbying and political operations to peddle their legislative agenda to state legislators, all while reporting little or no lobbying activities.

“The ‘experts’ of State Policy Network groups get quoted on TV, in the papers, or in the legislature as if they were nonpartisan, objective scholars on issues of public policy,” said Lisa Graves, Executive Director of the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD). “But in reality, SPN is a front for corporate interests with an extreme national policy agenda tied to some of the most retrograde special interests in the country, including the billionaire Koch brothers, the Waltons, the Bradley Foundation, the Roe Foundation, and the Coors family.”

Judicial nominees

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

This is one of the worst things Obama did — leaving all those seats vacant.

On the day President Obama took office, there were 55 vacancies on the federal bench. Today there are 82. To be fair, much of the blame for these vacancies rests with Senate Republicans, who ran an unprecedented campaign of obstruction during President Obama’s first term. And the new Senate must fix this problem in January, when a brief window opens up permitting them to enact major filibuster reform with only 51 votes.

The administration cannot lay all the blame for the vacancy crisis at the filibuster’s feet, however. Obama has been genuinely slow to name nominees, and he’s been just as reluctant to throw his political weight behind his judges. In a particularly costly miscalculation, the president turned his most outstanding nominee, future California Supreme Court Justice Goodwin Liu, into a target by nominating him without also nominating several similarly young brilliant progressives at the same time. As a result, every Senate Republican knew where to point their guns, and Liu’s confirmation hearings quickly degenerated into execution by firing squad.

As his second term approaches, Obama must nominate a large slate of Liu-caliber nominees who can provide an intellectual foil to the Kavanaughs, Suttons, and Clarence Thomases of the world (and to those who question my decision to include Thomas on this list of conservative thought leaders, don’t. We underestimate him at our peril).

Making Wall Street work for us

~ susie ~ 5 Comments

http://youtu.be/0ieaqiP6tX4

Very happy to read this David Dayen piece:

If asked, Americans of all political persuasions will say overwhelmingly that they prefer “tougher rules” for Wall Street. But what does that actually mean?

You can frame this conventionally: supporting regulators, punishing rules violators, mopping up 2008-style disasters to limit the damage and attempting to prevent such chaos from happening again. But by “tougher rules,” maybe Americans are really signaling a vague but persistent dissatisfaction with an economy that has become dominated by the financial sector. And you can see within that how transforming banking back to its traditional purpose — as a conduit for putting capital in the hands of worthwhile business ventures and driving shared prosperity — would be one antidote to an unequal society full of financial titan gatekeepers, who confiscate a giant share of the money flowing through the system.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren — in many ways the avatar of a new populist insurgency within the Democratic Party that seeks to combine financial reform and economic restoration — will speak later today in Washington at the launch of a new report that marks a key new phase in this movement. Released by Americans for Financial Reform and the Roosevelt Institute – and called “An Unfinished Mission: Making Wall Street Work for Us” — the report is a revelation, because it finally invites fundamental discussions about these issues. Its 11 chapters from some of the leading thinkers on financial reform do look back at the successes and failures of the signal financial reform law of this generation, the Dodd-Frank Act. But the report also weaves in a story about how we can reorient finance as a complement to the real economy, rather than its overriding force. Mike Konczal, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and the co-editor of the report, tells Salon, “The financial sector is still eating up a lot of GDP [gross domestic product], and it’s not clear what we’re getting out of it. We want to get the conversation at that level.”

This report fills in the details, creating definable action items and goals that could serve as a marker for legislative and regulatory action, as well as primaries in the next several election cycles.

Stop being ‘rational’ and ‘reasonable’ with these people

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

First of all, let’s get the terms straight. They’re not climate change “deniers”. They’re climate change enablers. And I don’t care if they’re sincerely misinformed Christianists, Teabaggers, plutocrats or just stupid. Stop treating them as if they might have a point. They don’t.

This legalistic game of insisting that no particular weather event can be linked to global warming is just a strategy, and if we play by their rules (and God knows, liberals are nothing if not rule followers), they will win. They’re winning now. Ask the citizens who are waking up to devastation in the Philippines this week.

We need to call out, harangue and punish every single politician who even hints at the idea that global warming is not settled science, that nothing can be done, and is not doing everything in his or her power to stop it. (i.e. anyone who supports the Keystone XL pipeline).

They need to be trained, like the dogs they are.

Like Chris Christie, for instance. I mean, here’s this governor whose crummy ratings ironically went sky-high as the result of a monstrous storm amplified by global warming — something for which his policy decisions are at least partially to blame.

That’s right: He’s to blame. I don’t care if it’s one fraction of one thousandth, because our world is dying the death of a million paper cuts. After meeting with David Koch, the New Jersey governor suddenly pulled his state out of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a regional cap-and-trade program for 10 states working together to meet carbon emission goals. Think Progress:

Yes, Christie showed his “commitment to the free enterprise system” by pulling out of a market-based system invented by Republicans and economists, championed by President George H. W. Bush, and originally supported at a regional level by GOP Governors like Pataki of New York.
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Hillary Clinton’s worst nightmare?

~ susie ~ 6 Comments

This New Republic story just went up last night, and already the internet is buzzing:

On one side is a majority of Democratic voters, who are angrier, more disaffected, and altogether more populist than they’ve been in years. They are more attuned to income inequality than before the Obama presidency and more supportive of Social Security and Medicare.1 They’ve grown fonder of regulation and more skeptical of big business.2 A recent Pew poll showed that voters under 30—who skew overwhelmingly Democratic—view socialism more favorably than capitalism. Above all, Democrats areincreasingly hostile to Wall Street and believe the government should rein it in.

On the other side is a group of Democratic elites associated with the Clinton era who, though they may have moved somewhat leftward in response to the recession—happily supporting economic stimulus and generous unemployment benefits—still fundamentally believe the economy functions best with a large, powerful, highly complex financial sector. Many members of this group have either made or raised enormous amounts of cash on Wall Street. They were deeply influential in limiting the reach of Dodd-Frank, the financial reform measure Obama signed in July of 2010.

But as central as this debate is to the identity of the party, Democrats won’t openly litigate it until they’re forced to ponder life after Obama. Partly out of deference to the president, partly out of a preoccupation with governing, and partly because there is no immediate political need, parties rarely conduct their internal soul-searching when they control the White House. It’s only when the president finally contemplates retirement that the feuding breaks out with real violence. Think of the Republican Party after George W. Bush. Or, you know, Yugoslavia.

Judging from recent events, the populists are likely to win. In September, New York City Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, running on a platform of taming inequality, routed his Democratic mayoral rival, Christine Quinn, known for her ties to Michael Bloomberg’s finance-friendly administration. The following week, Larry Summers, Obama’s first choice to succeed Ben Bernanke as Federal Reserve chairman, withdrew his name from consideration after months in which Senate Democrats signaled their annoyance with his previous support for deregulation. Not 48 hours later, Bill Daley, the former Obama chief of staff and JP Morgan executive, ended his primary campaign for governor of Illinois after internal polls showed him trailing his populist opponent.

All of this is deeply problematic for Hillary Clinton. As a student of public opinion, she clearly understands the direction her party is headed. As the head of an enterprise known as Clinton Inc. that requires vast sums of capital to function, she also realizes there are limits to how much she can alienate the lords of finance. For that matter, it’s not even clear Clinton would want to. “Many of her best friends, her intellectual brain trust [on economics], all come out of that world,” says a longtime Democratic operative who worked on Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign and then for Hillary in the White House. “She doesn’t have a problem on the fighting-for-working-class-folks side”—protecting Medicare and Social Security—“but it will be hard, really wrenching for her to be that populist on [finance] issues.”

Which brings us to the probable face of the insurgency. In addition to being strongly identified with the party’s populist wing, any candidate who challenged Clinton would need several key assets. The candidate would almost certainly have to be a woman, given Democrats’ desire to make history again. She would have to amass huge piles of money with relatively little effort. Above all, she would have to awaken in Democratic voters an almost evangelical passion. As it happens, there is precisely such a person. Her name is Elizabeth Warren.

Go read the rest.

Let’s hear it for Tom Terrific

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

Gov. Tom Corbett, of course:

Is Tom Corbett a socialist?

Crazy question, of course, for a Republican governor perhaps best known for suggesting Pennsylvania’s unemployed workers prefer receiving state benefits to actually hunkering down and finding a job. But consider two facts:

 

• Between January 2011 (when Corbett took office) and July of this year, the second-fastest job sector growth in Pennsylvania has been in accommodations and food service—basically low-paid hotel and restaurant jobs. The sector added 28,000 jobs during that time, second only to the health care and social assistance segment of the state economy, providing about a fifth of the state’s overall (meager) growth in jobs.

• As Alfred Lubriano detailed in Sunday’s Inquirer, about half of all non-managerial workers in the fast-food industry need public assistance to get by. The number is somewhat lower in Pennsylvania–about 42 percent–but the result is that state taxpayers still provide $204 million a year to provide food stamps, Medicaid and other forms of public assistance to fast-food employees.

Pennsylvania is far from alone, of course. According to the University of California Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education, more than $7 billion per year is spent annually providing such assistance to the employees of McDonald’s, Burger King and other fast-food restaurants—a taxpayer subsidy that helps all those for-profit companies avoid the responsibility of paying their workers a living wage. (And we won’t even mention the ag subsidies which lower the cost of the food those companies prepare.)

All of which means that the Corbett economy has been successful mostly in growing the kinds of jobs that require taxpayer assistance in order to be viable.

Hurray, capitalism!

Big Brother’s loyal sister

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Feinstein is a complete handmaiden to the defense industry. It’s made her a very wealthy woman:

Big Brother’s Loyal Sister: How Dianne Feinstein Is Betraying Civil Liberties (via LA Progressive)

Ever since the first big revelations about the National Security Agency five months ago, Dianne Feinstein has been in overdrive to defend the surveillance state. As chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, she generates an abundance of fog, weasel…

Continue reading “Big Brother’s loyal sister” →