Monday, October 31, 2011

Obama's a Gamer


"It is hard to look good when things around you are going bad. It is harder still when you are the brains and emotional rudder of the enterprise and little seems to be going as planned. It is most difficult of all when devastating failure is imminent."

That's New York Times sportswriter Bill Pennington commenting this morning on NY Giants quarterback Eli Manning, but he could also be describing the plight of President Obama as he faces the 2012 presidential election.

Like Manning, Obama helps his team win, but isn't loudly claiming credit or given his due when he seizes victory from the jaws of defeat. Also like Manning, Obama leads a team (the federal government) that can't get its act together or meet the new challenges it faces.

Despite his team's shortcomings, the President today is often the only guy on the team who seems to have a clue. Like the Giants under Manning's steady leadership, the U.S. government's highlight reel of stellar plays almost exclusively belongs to Obama in an otherwise dreadful performance by a Congress that deserves its 91 percent disapproval rating.

Finally, of late, Obama also deserves credit for making an impact on his own through executive orders that will at least in part address problems that Republicans fail to acknowledge, let alone seek to remedy.

Let's let Giants guard Chris Snee's comments about Manning sum up President Obama's impact on his team: "Because he's not loud or fiery, people think he doesn't lead, but that's just being short-sighted. We get a lot of confidence from him, from knowing that if we give him time to make his reads and see the field, good things will happen. His cool and his calmness -- it has a lot of impact on the whole team."

When you think about it as Pennington has, even when things are going badly, President Obama has made his team look, if not great, at least competitive.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone
Location:Maitland FL

Friday, October 28, 2011

It's the Narrative, Stupid

In recent years, I've been appalled with the disinformation of our political narrative generated by the 24-hour corporate media, which favors flame throwers over statesmen and rabble over reason. So, I'd like to begin today to use this blog to formulate a narrative of our current political and economic situation using research (isn't Google fantastic?), reasoning, human psychology, economic reality, and common sense. My bias, as such, is that I respect facts and conclusions based on substantive debate, but abhor ideological mythology masquerading as such.

By all accounts, the American economy today remains crippled but hangs tough, in recovery from one of the most disastrous failures of our mortgage loan and investment banking systems in history during the presidency of George W. Bush. Latest figures show that third-quarter growth in the overall economy rose 2.5% -- not a huge jump, but significant nonetheless after a full two years of economic contraction nationwide. Today, while banks are back in business paying huge bonuses and corporations sit on $1 trillion in profits, we still suffer from high unemployment, which stubbornly remains at over 9%. Private sector job growth has improved since President Obama's 2009 Economic Recovery Act passed Congress. That help became law while Democrats controlled the House of Representatives and had the 60 votes needed in the Senate to override a Republican filibuster. After almost three years, the Democratic 2009 stimulus has done its job, creating more than 2 million jobs while providing $340 billion in tax cuts for small businesses. However, with no further public funds forthcoming, state and city budget shortfalls have led to job cuts among public services workers such as teachers, police and firefighters, further adding to public sentiment of economic pessimism.

Meanwhile since the 2010 election--in which Republicans won the majority in the House of Representatives 242 Republicans to 192 Democrats and Senate Democrats lost enough seats to ensure incessant Republican filibusters would prevail--legislative gridlock has ensued. The election, far from pushing the political culture toward reasonable solutions, guaranteed one thing: that Republicans would have more power to pursue a blatant political goal of blocking any further fiscal stimulus, such as President Obama's American Jobs Act, while also seeking to defeat the president in the 2012 election.

Republicans made one argument in 2010 that resonated with voters as the economy continued to tank: "Government is the problem, and Obama and the Democratic majorities in Congress are in charge." Their plan was to avoid political promises or any substantive proposals that might distract voters from their campaign attacks on Democratic incumbents. Said Neil Newhouse of the Republican polling firm Public Opinion Strategies, "The smart political approach would be to make the election about the Democrats." Explicit in this argument with Mr. Obama still in the White House was the promise that Republican majorities would present a roadblock to Democrats' longtime stance as defenders of federal action at all levels of American life. Without a great deal of introspection, voters took the bait and backed some of the most anti-government conservatives in the modern era.

Today, the result of that election is Republican-led gridlock. The 2010 voters who backed Republicans, therefore, must ask themselves before the next election whether or not their choices at the ballot box were in the best interest of our country.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Location:Maitland FL

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

To Big To Jail Goes National



Some of you may recall on Oct. 4 I Facebook-posted my slogan and poster. Well, today I learned the "Too Big To Jail" slogan is used as a section header in a book released today, With Liberty and Justice for Some, by Salon writer Glenn Greenwald. He is a former Constitutional and civil rights litigator and is the author of two New York Times Bestselling books whose columns appear regularly at the online publication www.Salon.com/writer/glenn_greenwald/.


Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Republican Government Is the Problem

"Government is the problem," President Ronald Reagan famously said. He was correct, but not in the way many Republicans today would have us believe. Here's why:

Today, our government faces a stagnant recovery with anemic private-sector job growth along with the loss of public service jobs due to decreases in tax revenues. The two parties in our political discourse have proposed competing roadmaps to address the issue: Republicans fight for tax breaks to incentivize job creation and argue that additional federal stimulus spending for job creation only adds to our growing deficit; Democrats call for passage of job-creating legislation to immediately pump $435 billion into our economy at a time when people and businesses show a continued reluctance to spend, while they also point out that solving the deficit problem is important, but only after addressing the more pressing issue of job losses that spun out of control during the George W. Bush administration.

So far, the economic battle is at a stalemate, while the political battle rages in Washington, D.C., where filibusters in the Senate by the Republican minority ensures President Barack Obama's American Jobs Act, or most any part of it, will not be allowed to pass by a simple majority of 51 votes. This, despite a broad swath of public sentiment measured in polling that a majority of Americans agree with many of its tenants. Which side is correct? Is this another case where Reagan's battle cry rings true? Maybe, but not necessarily as he intended.

As famed economist John Maynard Keynes said in a 1930 investigation into the causes of the Great Depression, "We do nothing because we have not the money. But it is precisely because we do not do anything that we have not the money." The competing conservative argument at the time was to remind federal officials that employment levels are determined by the price of labor, that supply creates its own demand, and that savings automatically translate into investment. Sound familiar? It's trickle down before Reagan's scriptwriters got a hold of it.

But wait, the conservatives also argued that attempts at large-scale spending invited not only runaway inflation but also tyrannical socialism. Again, ring any bells? America, under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, eventually agreed with Keynes and undertook many major spending programs to spur economic growth after the Herbert Hoover administration's hands-off policies proved to be an abject failure. Far from leading to a tyrannical state, Roosevelt's stimulus policies created immediate job opportunities and went a long way toward bringing America back from the brink of ruin during a time when government was perhaps the only entity capable of injecting money into the system. Our country went on to three decades of unprecedented economic growth under rational leadership. Only when the Reagan era ushered in a turn away from these policies supporting a strong middle class did the American economy come unglued.

What of the warning about the rise of socialism by the conservatives at the time? Never happened. Yet the charge lives, especially in the radical Tea Party signs skewering Obama. In his day, Keynes fought the socialism fearmongering by reminding supporters of classical economic theory that the rise of National Socialism in Germany prior to WWII was fueled not by big government but by mass unemployment and a failure of capitalism. Prosperity through the pursuit of full employment, Keynes argued, was the best way to achieve an independent citizenry and assure them of a vibrant democracy.

Today, Keynes would tell us the do-nothing right-wingers are creating an environment where the socialist threat they profess to abhor could rear its ugly head in the months ahead if nothing is done to address the jobs issue and growing earnings inequity between the very rich and the rest of our wage earners. In other words, Keynes today would say government, in doing nothing, is the problem, and would warn that a swing toward social anarchy not unlike the one in pre-WWII Germany is a distinct possibility unless our government takes an active role in turning around the jobless recovery of 2011.

Jail the Criminal Money Men

Put Them in Prison: A poster I dreamed up calls for investigation, prosecution, conviction and jail time for financial destruction CEOs of Wall Street and mortgage companies who have thrown us into a great recession. Courage!


Taxes Double for the 99%

Facts behind Occupy Wall Street: This graph shows the results of Republican success in slashing the tax rates for the rich (green bars) while the 99% rates have doubled.


Truth About Obama Job Creation

Obama Job Record vs. Bush: Republicans who oppose President Obama's jobs bill keep repeating a lie that his first stimulus "didn't create a single job." Well, here's another fact check that begs to differ. The chart shows that the crisis in job losses created under Bush/Cheney has been turned around by Obama/Biden. If you think otherwise, it is because a vast right-wing communications campaign keeps promoting lies and repeating them until all to many people start believing them. OWS has begun changing that radical right-wing narrative. The truth is one of the biggest threats to the Tea Party-led mendacity. OWS 99%ers, keeping America honest.


How Wage Earners Have Been Shafted

Facts behind Occupy Wall Street: This graph shows how the income of America's top 1% (red line) soared while the wages of the other 99% of Americans (blue line) lost ground for the last three decades, but particularly since 2003. This gap is the primary reason why the Occupy Wall Street movement is spreading, supported by almost 80% of Americans in a recent poll.