TODAY'S TOPICS: Austerity, New Deal, Social Security, Economic Justice, Public Employees, Wikileaks, Huxley/Orwell
New GOP House: Austerity, Social Security, and the Death of Economic Justice?
If there’s one over-arching theme of the past two years, epitomized by the GOP, the corporate wing of the Democratic Party, and our President, its the death of economic justice in this country…or even the facade that it is of interest anymore.
Hell, in the midst of a time in which income disparity is greater than anytime since the age of the Robber Barons, coupled by a financial collapse that resulted in the perpetrators of the fraud that caused it get rewarded (bailouts, no interest loans), while those at the bottom and in the middle are allowed to whither on vine, we have actually seen the rich get tax cuts, federal employee wages freezed, and a growing call and acceptance of deep cuts to social security and public programs at a time they’re needed most (and of course pensions). A truly remarkable development – particularly when considering Democrats control the White House and Congress.
GOP’s Big Wins: Tax Cuts and Omnibus Spending Bill (with Debt Limit as next year’s “Hostage”)
As I have written in painstaking detail, the writing is on the wall, and the coming assaults on the New Deal are all too clear. The GOP, despite what you’ve heard, were the actual “winners” in the lame duck session. Yes, some notable accomplishments were achieved by the Democrats, and they certainly “won’ the short term battle. But what overrides everything else was the capitulation on tax cuts and the omnibus spending bill (over a trillion in spending given over to the GOP in 2011 due to their threat to shut the government down) – both of which give the Republicans an enormous advantage in the coming fight over the debt limit, to be used as a hostage against social security and New Deal like programs.
If Obama and the Democrats are smart, by the least they will fight to separate the spending bill from the debt limit in order to limit the GOP’s ability to take yet another hostage (ala unemployment benefits attached to tax cuts) – and not pay the deserved high price for their actions.
Be warned, the GOP’s hand is all the stronger because of the nearly $1 trillion we just added to the debt thanks to the tax cut deal. Meanwhile, the spending bill – one that would have funded the operations of government for the next year - gives them the other piece of the puzzle: control of the purse strings. The GOP has made it clear they won’t approve any bill that provides funding for the financial or health care reform laws Obama signed into law in this coming year’s bill (in other words, those may have been largely Pyrrhic victories)…in addition to their new found power to cut major spending initiatives, like infrastructure and transportation.
On de-funding financial reform, as Isaac Pool notes, that means “the agency that will make sure credit ratings aren’t rigged by the banks, the way they were in the run-up to the economic collapse: Gone. The budgets that will allow the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission monitor reckless and/or illegal bank activity: Gone. Even the office that would protect investors – that is, people who buy stocks – would be eliminated. And the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and ts aggressive chief, Elizabeth Warren, is the next target in their sights.
That's the formula: put fewer cops on the beat, make sure the cops are docile, and harass the ones who aren't. Cut the garlic budget just as the vampires prepare for their midnight run. That makes it safe for the Wall Street casino to reopen as if nothing ever happened—and put us at greater risk for another financial collapse.
On spending, House Republicans want to cut government spending to 2008 level. As Pool again notes, “They'd exclude defense and homeland security spending, so what that really means is a 20 percent cut in everything else, according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. That would lead to the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs, with recession-worsening effects in every state. And how is government supposed to make a program work such as the stepped-up food safety enforcement approved this month by Congress if it can't hire more staff?”
And remember, the real prize here is Social Security’s $2.6 trillion trust fund, so they can use it to pay for two wars and tax breaks for the rich. They’ve managed to capture most of the media with phony scare tactics about Social Security and insolvency. They’ve roped in quite a few Democrats, too.
Once the program is gutted, they’ll pretend to “make up the difference” by bringing back George W. Bush’s failed “privatization” scheme. The end result will be cutbacks in benefits for the lower and middle-income elderly and more customers for the Wall Street gambling casino.
So the inevitable, endless budget crisis will be kept hostage by the tax cut deal (particularly taxes for corporations, wall street, and the rich), which will in turn result in us being forced by the GOP to either cut NECESSARY appropriations for the full fiscal year (because they have control of the spending bill from last year), or face their threat to prevent raising the debt limit – and that’s why I say that the GOP actually won…and the Democrats walked right into their trap.
As I wrote in last week’s posts, the “debt limit” threat is one that Obama and the Democrats MUST CALL!! No one is hurt more by failing to raise the debt ceiling than Wall Street – so chances are the GOP will blink. The President, let’s hope, will at least limit the damage by refusing to sign any bill that would hurt the economy (another way of saying “reducing aggregate demand”), and let that be where he draws the line in the sand.
No matter how you slice it however, the dye has been cast: a lot of pain for a lot of struggling people is coming – and the President deserves some serious blame for allowing this reality to be so set in stone (think deficit commission too).
What Happened to Economic Justice?
This leads me to the bottom line. Cutting taxes on the rich and increasing military spending are largely responsible for causing the deficit – yet over the past two years we have cut taxes for the rich more while drastically increasing military spending and escalating the war in Afghanistan…while agreeing (Obama that is) to cuts in social spending and the freezing of public employees’ wages (all of which is a Republican's dream). That’s a fact…no amount of Democratic; pro-Obama spin changes it. And, no amount of GOP whining about deficits will change the fact that their policies are responsible for, and would greatly increase, the deficit too.
More important however, is the larger question of what happened to the Democratic Party’s fundamental ideals regarding income disparity and economic justice? No matter what victory you want to cite from the past couple years, what is clear is these Democratic principles have been largely bargained away (over 3 decades really), and little to no pretense even exists any longer that such principles remain (aside from most of the progressive caucus and Senators like Bernie Sanders).
Consider the context in which we have been giving more to the top and less to the bottom: The "emergency response'' to the economic collapse from the Fed was itself as clear a case of socialism for the very rich and rugged free market capitalism, even social Darwinism for everybody else, as one could imagine.
Furthermore, consider how we treated the criminal enterprises responsible for the collapse that we are now taking out on the public: Goldman Sachs received nearly $600 billion. Morgan Stanley received nearly $2 trillion. Citigroup received $1.8 trillion. Bear Stearns received nearly $1 trillion. And Merrill Lynch received some $1.5 trillion in short-term loans from the Fed.
AS Bernie Sanders noted, “The Fed bailed out the Korea Development Bank, the wholly owned, state-owned Bank of South Korea, by purchasing over $2 billion of its commercial paper. The sole purpose of the Korea Development Bank is to finance and manage major industrial projects to enhance the national economy not of the United States of America but of South Korea. I am not against South Korea. I wish the South Koreans all the luck in the world. But it should not be the taxpayers of the United States lending their banks' money to create jobs in South Korea. I would suggest maybe we want to create jobs in the United States of America. At the same time, the Fed also extended over $40 billion for the Central Bank of South Korea so that it had enough money to bail out its own banks.
BofA and its predecessors Countrywide and Merrill Lynch accessed the Fed’s Primary Dealer Credit Facility 416 times, for a total of $2.783 trillion. A full $476 billion in junk bonds were pledged as collateral for the loans, or roughly 17 percent. The PDCF is an overnight facility, so a lot of these loans are simply being rolled over day-to-day. Nevertheless, it’s a staggering amount of money, with an enormous degree of totally worthless collateral being pledged to justify it.”
So let’s be real, real frank here: when candidate Obama declared war on inequality, who would have thought he meant “surrendering to inequality”? It actually shouldn’t be much of a shock – Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter really began the Party’s move in this direction. In the deal he just cut with congressional Republicans, the president not only agreed to extend the Bush tax cuts for the highest earners but also to eliminate the estate tax for all but the top 3/10’s of 1% of people that pass down more than $5 million in inheritance to their soon to be rich children.
As Heather from C&L’s lays out (and she’s RIGHT ON), “Obama administration policy responses have failed to address outsized Wall Street and CEO compensation in any meaningful way. Bonus season is upon us, and with the big banks now liberated from their TARP obligations, the general attitude seems to be, “What financial crisis?” Class war, prosecuted from above, is depicted as a threat from below. A few months ago, billionaire private equity manager Steve Schwarzman had the gall to compare the Obama administration’s attempt to tax “carried interest” at the same rate as other forms of income to “when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.”
I would add that the slack labor market has caused average incomes and benefits to fall and not rise, as more companies rely on temporary labor and cancel health insurance plans. The budget cuts expected as what amounts to the second half of the tax cut deal will fall on the safety net benefits of the poor. And even the initial tax cut deal effectively raises taxes on 50 million low-income earners by a small amount, while cutting them by up to $1,600 for anyone making over $100,000 a year.
Income inequality isn’t just something that would be nice to curtail, but if we can’t, at least the Galtian “producers” will trickle down some of their largesse to the rest of us. It’s been fundamental to the imbalance of the economy over the past few decades. It forces the economy into a speculative bubble machine as concentrated wealth at the top seeks higher yields. It turns consumers into debt instruments who spend to fuel the economy without a solid foundation to pay it back. The debt becomes a hot potato that everyone tries to push off onto someone else to realize the losses. The political economy of a country with rampant inequality becomes extremely tilted toward one class, as safety nets break down. And the speculative bubble chasing inevitably leads to financial meltdown, as it has every time money has been concentrated at the top.
Far from a war, 2009-2010 have looked like an unconditional surrender to the forces of inequality. And that has the potential to lead to another serious implosion down the road.
None of this is to say of course he’s not exponentially better than McCain or Palin, or for that matter, ANY REPUBLICAN. That is not the question. The question is whether he, or the Democratic Party establishment even feigns interest any longer in the real crisis and challenge of our time: our nation’s transformation into some kind of neo-feudalist state, with the rich having everything and the rest of us competing for scraps with fewer and fewer benefits, protections, and, public support – all as the “commons” are being increasingly privatized (i.e. education, health care, electricity, water, health care, etc.), and a massive military industrial complex holds more and more sway over our foreign policy.
If the “left” party in our two party duopoly system no longer takes on big business or the war machine, where does that leave our country?
We will find out how willing the Democrats are to fight for these principles this coming two years, as will be evidenced by the upcoming GOP attack on Social Security, along with their budget austerity proposals (including Obama’s deficit commission), and our ongoing disastrous occupation of Afghanistan (and Iraq for that matter). But, whatever fight they do put up, we can be assured of one thing: progress won't be made to help shrink income disparity - the best we can hope for is to prevent the GOP and big business (and sadly Obama) from exacerbating it even more.
Again, I think Heather nails it, and it falls exactly in line with what I wrote last week, stating “Obama’s supporters note that many of us don’t even get excited about such vtories as the repeal of DADT, and they ask “what has happened to DU?” What has happened is that we have a Democratic president whom many or most of us have come to believe is very bad for our country. More specifically, we believe that his actions have repeatedly supported the wrong side in the ongoing class war. We cannot get excited about small victories because they don’t seem to us to matter that much in the context of today’s overall picture.
What do I mean by small victories, and why would I describe the repeal of DADT as a small victory? Well, to be blunt about it, many of us believe that the class war is the defining issue of our time because so much else depends on it. The result of this class war will determine how the necessities of life are distributed in our society. It will determine the status or even the existence of long-standing social safety net programs such as Medicare and Social Security. It will determine whether the corporatocracy is allowed to maintain and extend their control over systems of communication in our country. It will determine how many people are able to find jobs and obtain adequate health care, shelter, and food for themselves and their families. And it will determine whether or not any restraints will be put on the ability of the corporatocracy to destroy our planet.
With all that at stake, we can’t get too excited about victories not related to the class war. DADT was repealed because the corporatocracy didn’t care to fight against repeal. That did not threaten their profits in the least. They were probably happy to let it be repealed because it gives the appearance to some degree that we are a progressive nation. If DADT repeal threatened their profits or their power they would have fought tooth and nail against it, and it would not have been repealed.
VIDEO SECTION
And look at this! My favorite blogger - David Dayen - is interviewed on this EXACT ISSUE (the new GOP House and what's coming!!! Particularly their strategy to destroy public employee unions...as I've been talking about A LOT here lately). Watch him and Sam Seder (another great progressive):
http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/heather/gops-plan-economy-force-states-bankruptcy
Naomi Wolf is so right on about the HUGE THREAT to free speech and journalism if Julian Assange is prosecuted under the Espionage Act…this is a big issue to follow…and why its so important we stand up for him…Spitzer does a good job here too. Sadly, Jeffrey Toobin is GROSSLY disappointing on this topic…usually he’s pretty good…
http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/heather/naomi-wolf-use-espionage-act-wikileaks-cas
McCain blocking efforts to reduce military suicides…yes, you read that correctly…he’s truly a despicable person…
http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/heather/john-mccain-objected-military-suicide-prev
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2011: A Brave New Dystopia, by Chris Hedges
Anybody that has had in depth political discussions with me, or read this blog over the years, has probably heard or read me make the case that we are living through a time resembling some kind of unholy "love child" between the theses of Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984.
I hate to drop this kind of pessimism on you all, but Chris Hedges expertly makes the case I have been for years now…and it’s not pretty. But, sadly, I think he’s right…and I’ve always felt my responsibility on this blog is to tell it like it is, not how I wish it would be.
A FEW CLIPS:
We have been gradually disempowered by a corporate state that, as Huxley foresaw, seduced and manipulated us through sensual gratification, cheap mass-produced goods, boundless credit, political theater and amusement. While we were entertained, the regulations that once kept predatory corporate power in check were dismantled, the laws that once protected us were rewritten and we were impoverished. Now that credit is drying up, good jobs for the working class are gone forever and mass-produced goods are unaffordable, we find ourselves transported from “Brave New World” to “1984.” The state, crippled by massive deficits, endless war and corporate malfeasance, is sliding toward bankruptcy. It is time for Big Brother to take over from Huxley’s feelies, the orgy-porgy and the centrifugal bumble-puppy. We are moving from a society where we are skillfully manipulated by lies and illusions to one where we are overtly controlled.
Orwell warned of a world where books were banned. Huxley warned of a world where no one wanted to read books. Orwell warned of a state of permanent war and fear. Huxley warned of a culture diverted by mindless pleasure. Orwell warned of a state where every conversation and thought was monitored and dissent was brutally punished. Huxley warned of a state where a population, preoccupied by trivia and gossip, no longer cared about truth or information. Orwell saw us frightened into submission. Huxley saw us seduced into submission. But Huxley, we are discovering, was merely the prelude to Orwell. Huxley understood the process by which we would be complicit in our own enslavement. Orwell understood the enslavement. Now that the corporate coup is over, we stand naked and defenseless. We are beginning to understand, as Karl Marx knew, that unfettered and unregulated capitalism is a brutal and revolutionary force that exploits human beings and the natural world until exhaustion or collapse.
SNIP
The result is a monochromatic system of information. Celebrity courtiers, masquerading as journalists, experts and specialists, identify our problems and patiently explain the parameters. All those who argue outside the imposed parameters are dismissed as irrelevant cranks, extremists or members of a radical left. Prescient social critics, from Ralph Nader to Noam Chomsky, are banished. Acceptable opinions have a range of A to B. The culture, under the tutelage of these corporate courtiers, becomes, as Huxley noted, a world of cheerful conformity, as well as an endless and finally fatal optimism. We busy ourselves buying products that promise to change our lives, make us more beautiful, confident or successful as we are steadily stripped of rights, money and influence.
All messages we receive through these systems of communication, whether on the nightly news or talk shows like “Oprah,” promise a brighter, happier tomorrow. And this, as Wolin points out, is “the same ideology that invites corporate executives to exaggerate profits and conceal losses, but always with a sunny face.” We have been entranced, as Wolin writes, by “continuous technological advances” that “encourage elaborate fantasies of individual prowess, eternal youthfulness, beauty through surgery, actions measured in nanoseconds: a dream-laden culture of ever-expanding control and possibility, whose denizens are prone to fantasies because the vast majority have imagination but little scientific knowledge.”
Our manufacturing base has been dismantled. Speculators and swindlers have looted the U.S. Treasury and stolen billions from small shareholders who had set aside money for retirement or college. Civil liberties, including habeas corpus and protection from warrantless wiretapping, have been taken away. Basic services, including public education and health care, have been handed over to the corporations to exploit for profit. The few who raise voices of dissent, who refuse to engage in the corporate happy talk, are derided by the corporate establishment as freaks.
SNIP
The noose is tightening. The era of amusement is being replaced by the era of repression. Tens of millions of citizens have had their e-mails and phone records turned over to the government. We are the most monitored and spied-on citizenry in human history. Many of us have our daily routine caught on dozens of security cameras. Our proclivities and habits are recorded on the Internet. Our profiles are electronically generated. Our bodies are patted down at airports and filmed by scanners. And public service announcements, car inspection stickers, and public transportation posters constantly urge us to report suspicious activity. The enemy is everywhere.
Those who do not comply with the dictates of the war on terror, a war which, as Orwell noted, is endless, are brutally silenced. The draconian security measures used to cripple protests at the G-20 gatherings in Pittsburgh and Toronto were wildly disproportionate for the level of street activity. But they sent a clear message—DO NOT TRY THIS. The FBI’s targeting of antiwar and Palestinian activists, which in late September saw agents raid homes in Minneapolis and Chicago, is a harbinger of what is to come for all who dare defy the state’s official Newspeak. The agents—our Thought Police—seized phones, computers, documents and other personal belongings. Subpoenas to appear before a grand jury have since been served on 26 people. The subpoenas cite federal law prohibiting “providing material support or resources to designated foreign terrorist organizations.” Terror, even for those who have nothing to do with terror, becomes the blunt instrument used by Big Brother to protect us from ourselves.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/12/27-1
New Report Exposes Media Love Affair with Right-Wingers and the Fox News Worldview: 'Reporters Can't Get Enough', Joshua Holland
A FEW CLIPS…get the facts about our media:
Forget about fake moon landings and Obama's birth certificate. The most enduring unfounded conspiracy theory in America is that our institutions of knowledge – the media, the academy and even science -- are biased in favor of liberals.
SNIP
Indeed, a Pew Research Center survey found that of the top 10 most-covered candidates in the midterm elections, conservatives held the top three spots. Here's more evidence. I asked AOL's Relegence team, which tracks more than 30,000 news sites on the Web, to compare coverage of comparable liberals and conservatives over the past 12 months. The results are stark. Conservatives were featured in vastly more stories.
Among the study's findings:
In 2010, Sarah Palin, the 2008 GOP vice-presidential nominee who currently holds no power, got three times the coverage that Joe Biden, who is actually a sitting vice president received.
The disparity in coverage between conservative talker Glenn Beck and the liberal Keith Olbermann was large. “Month after month, Beck racked up hundreds, if not thousands, of stories, wrote Merline. “In contrast, Olbermann typically only got a few dozen stories a month in which he was featured prominently -- except for the month when he was temporarily suspended.”
Fringe candidates get coverage if they're conservative. As Merline put it, “Christine O'Donnell was an unqualified, kooky candidate who took everyone by surprise when she beat a far better known, established candidate for the Republican Senate nomination in Delaware. Liberal Alvin Greene was a completely unqualified, kooky candidate who also shocked everyone by getting the Democratic nomination for Senate over four-term South Carolina state lawmaker Vic Rawl. Both went on to decisively lose their elections.” O'Donnell more than doubled the coverage Greene received.
SNIP
A months-long investigation in 2010 by the Nation’s Sebastian Jones revealed what he called a far-reaching “media-lobbying complex”—dozens of corporate hired guns who appear on network broadcasts without disclosing their ties to the firms they work for. Jones wrote of “the covert corporate influence-peddling on cable news.” Jones found that during just the previous three years, “at least seventy-five registered lobbyists, public relations representatives and corporate officials—people paid by companies and trade groups to manage their public image and promote their financial and political interests”—had appeared on the major news channels. “Many have been regulars on more than one of the cable networks, turning in dozens—and in some cases hundreds—of appearances,” he wrote.
Wat WikiLeaks revealed to the world in 2010, Glenn Greenwald
Be sure to click on the link so you can get a quick rundown of just how many really, really important stories Wikileaks actually made public….when you see them, you’ll know why there is such overwhelming and uniform opposition to them, and Julian Assange, from our Matrix…because it is the Matrix itself which is threatened.
A FEW CLIPS:
As revealing as the disclosures themselves are, the reactions to them have been equally revealing. The vast bulk of the outrage has been devoted not to the crimes that have been exposed but rather to those who exposed them: WikiLeaks and (allegedly) Bradley Manning. A consensus quickly emerged in the political and media class that they are Evil Villains who must be severely punished, while those responsible for the acts they revealed are guilty of nothing. That reaction has not been weakened at all even by the Pentagon's own admission that, in stark contrast to its own actions, there is no evidence -- zero -- that any of WikiLeaks' actions has caused even a single death. Meanwhile, the American establishment media -- even in the face of all these revelations -- continues to insist on the contradictory, Orwellian platitudes that (a) there is Nothing New™ in anything disclosed by WikiLeaks and (b) WikiLeaks has done Grave Harm to American National Security™ through its disclosures.
It's unsurprising that political leaders would want to convince people that the true criminals are those who expose acts of high-level political corruption and criminality, rather than those who perpetrate them. Every political leader would love for that self-serving piety to take hold. But what's startling is how many citizens and, especially, "journalists" now vehemently believe that as well. In light of what WikiLeaks has revealed to the world about numerous governments, just fathom the authoritarian mindset that would lead a citizen -- and especially a "journalist" -- to react with anger that these things have been revealed; to insist that these facts should have been kept concealed and it'd be better if we didn't know; and, most of all, to demand that those who made us aware of it all be punished (the True Criminals) while those who did these things (The Good Authorities) be shielded:
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/24/wikileaks/index.html
