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The Sequester and the Tea Party Plot |
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Friday, 01 March 2013 08:55 |
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Reich writes: "Sequestration is only the start. What they set out to do was not simply change Washington but eviscerate the U.S. government - 'drown it in the bathtub,' in the words of their guru Grover Norquist."
Portrait, Robert Reich, 08/16/09. (photo: Perian Flaherty)
The Sequester and the Tea Party Plot
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog
01 March 13
 magine a plot to undermine the government of the United States, to destroy much of its capacity to do the public's business, and to sow distrust among the population.
Imagine further that the plotters infiltrate Congress and state governments, reshape their districts to give them disproportionate influence in Washington, and use the media to spread big lies about the government.
Finally, imagine they not only paralyze the government but are on the verge of dismantling pieces of it.
Far-fetched? Perhaps. But take a look at what's been happening in Washington and many state capitals since Tea Party fanatics gained effective control of the Republican Party, and you'd be forgiven if you see parallels.
Tea Party Republicans are crowing about the "sequestration" cuts beginning today (Friday). "This will be the first significant tea party victory in that we got what we set out to do in changing Washington," says Rep. Tim Huelskamp (Kan.), a Tea Partier who was first elected in 2010.
Sequestration is only the start. What they set out to do was not simply change Washington but eviscerate the U.S. government - "drown it in the bathtub," in the words of their guru Grover Norquist - slashing Social Security and Medicare, ending worker protections we've had since the 1930s, eroding civil rights and voting rights, terminating programs that have helped the poor for generations, and making it impossible for the government to invest in our future.
Sequestration grew out of a strategy hatched soon after they took over the House in 2011, to achieve their goals by holding hostage the full faith and credit of the United States - notwithstanding the Constitution's instruction that the public debt of the United States "not be questioned."
To avoid default on the public debt, the White House and House Republicans agreed to harsh and arbitrary "sequestered" spending cuts if they couldn't come up with a more reasonable deal in the interim. But the Tea Partiers had no intention of agreeing to anything more reasonable. They knew the only way to dismember the federal government was through large spending cuts without tax increases.
Nor do they seem to mind the higher unemployment their strategy will almost certainly bring about. Sequestration combined with January's fiscal cliff deal is expected to slow economic growth by 1.5 percentage points this year - dangerous for an economy now crawling at about 2 percent. It will be even worse if the Tea Partiers refuse to extend the government's spending authority, which expires March 27.
A conspiracy theorist might think they welcome more joblessness because they want Americans to be even more fearful and angry. Tea Partiers use fear and anger in their war against the government - blaming the anemic recovery on government deficits and the government's size, and selling a poisonous snake-oil of austerity economics and trickle-down economics as the remedy.
They likewise use the disruption and paralysis they've sown in Washington to persuade Americans government is necessarily dysfunctional, and politics inherently bad. Their continuing showdowns and standoffs are, in this sense, part of the plot.
What is the President's response? He still wants a so-called "grand bargain" of "balanced" spending cuts (including cuts in the projected growth of Social Security and Medicare) combined with tax increases on the wealthy. So far, though, he has agreed to a gross imbalance - $1.5 trillion in cuts to Republicans' $600 billion in tax increases on the rich.
The President apparently believes Republicans are serious about deficit reduction, when in fact the Tea Partiers now running the GOP are serious only about dismembering the government.
And he seems to accept that the budget deficit is the largest economic problem facing the nation, when in reality the largest problem is continuing high unemployment (some 20 million Americans unemployed or under-employed), declining real wages, and widening inequality. Deficit reduction now or in the near-term will only make these worse.
Besides, the deficit is now down to about 5 percent of GDP - where it was when Bill Clinton took office. It is projected to mushroom in later years mainly because healthcare costs are expected to rise faster than the economy is expected to grow, and the American population is aging. These trends have little or nothing to do with government programs. In fact, Medicare is far more efficient than private health insurance.
I suggest the President forget about a "grand bargain." In fact, he should stop talking about the budget deficit and start talking about jobs and wages, and widening inequality - as he did in the campaign. And he should give up all hope of making a deal with the Tea Partiers who now run the Republican Party.
Instead, the President should let the public see the Tea Partiers for who they are - a small, radical minority intent on dismantling the government of the United States. As long as they are allowed to dictate the terms of public debate they will continue to hold the rest of us hostage to their extremism.
Robert B. Reich, Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, was Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration. Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the last century. He has written thirteen books, including the best sellers "Aftershock" and "The Work of Nations." His latest is an e-book, "Beyond Outrage." He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine and chairman of Common Cause.
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Walling Ourselves Inside a Militarized Police State |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=6396"><span class="small">Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch</span></a>
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Thursday, 28 February 2013 16:04 |
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Engelhardt writes: "It was, in a sense, so expectable, so leave-no-child-behind. I'm talking about the arming of American schools."
Engelhardt: 'Imagine for a moment how much better off we might be today if the money that has ... poured into the militarization of the police had been plowed into American education or infrastructure or just about anything else.' (photo: Max Klingensmith/flickr)
Walling Ourselves Inside a Militarized Police State
By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
28 February 13
t was, in a sense, so expectable, so leave-no-child-behind. I’m talking about the arming of American schools. Think of it as the next step in the militarization of this country, which follows all-too-logically from developments since September 11, 2001. In the wake of 9/11, police departments nationwide began to militarize in a big way, and the next thing you knew, the police were looking ever less like old-style neighborhood patrollers and ever more like mini-anti-terror armies. The billy club, the simple sidearm? So Old School. So retro.
When it came to weaponry for the new, twenty-first-century version of the police, it was a matter of letting the good times roll: Tasers, flash grenades, pepper spray, incendiary tear gas, Kevlar helmets, assault rifles, bomb-detection robots, armored vehicles and tanks, special-ops-style SWAT teams, drone mini-submarines, drone aircraft, you name it. Today, even school police are being armed with assault rifles. And with it all goes a paramilitary fashion craze that anyone who observed the police in the Occupy moment is most familiar with.
In addition, the U.S. military is now offloading billions of dollars worth of its surplus equipment, some of it assumedly used in places like Iraq and Afghanistan against armed insurgents, on police forces even in small towns nationwide. This includes M-16s, helmet-mounted infrared goggles, amphibious tanks, and helicopters. And now, the same up-armoring mentality is being brought to bear on a threat worse than terror: our children. Think of it as the reductio ad absurdum of the new national security state. First, they locked down the airports, then the capital, then the borders, and finally the schools. Now, we’re ready!
But the seldom-asked question is: ready for what? After all, with a few rare exceptions (including unpredictable lone wolf attacks like the attempted assassination of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords; the disgruntled software engineer who flew his plane into a building containing an IRS office in Austin, Texas, killing himself and an IRS manager; Major Nidal Hassan’s murderous rampage at Fort Hood, Texas; and the Newtown slaughter), just about all “terror” threats in the U.S. have essentially been FBI sting operations involving crews of “terrorists” who were, by themselves, incapable of planning their way out of the proverbial paper bag.
Imagine for a moment how much better off we might be today if the money that has, for more than a decade, poured into the militarization of the police had been plowed into American education or infrastructure or just about anything else. In that case, we might be prepared for something other than fighting phantoms and - as Chase Madar, author of The Passion of Bradley Manning, points out in “The School Security America Doesn’t Need” - handcuffing seven-year-olds. For the TV version of what’s happening in our schools in the post-Newtown moment, you would have to imagine “Homeland” populated by overarmed Muppets and Thomas the Tank (not the Tank Engine).
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of "The United States of Fear" as well as "The End of Victory Culture," runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is "Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050." To listen to Timothy MacBain's latest Tomcast audio interview in which Engelhardt discusses drone warfare and the Obama administration, click here or download it to your iPod here.
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Congress's Power to Protect the Vote |
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Thursday, 28 February 2013 15:55 |
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Excerpt: "The voter ID laws and other tactics that sprang up in several states last year to prevent minorities from casting their ballots offer incontestable proof of the need for strict voting rights laws."
The US Capitol Building at sunrise. (photo: Jim Young/Reuters)
Congress's Power to Protect the Vote
By The New York Times | Editorial
28 February 13
 he voter ID laws and other tactics that sprang up in several states last year to prevent minorities from casting their ballots offer incontestable proof of the need for strict voting rights laws.
Yet at the argument on Wednesday in Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court's conservative justices left the ominous impression that they were willing to deny this reality and repudiate Congress's power to enforce the right to vote by striking down a central provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act requires nine states (seven of them in the South) and parts of seven others with records of extreme discrimination against minority voters to get approval from the Justice Department or a special court in Washington before they can make any changes in how they hold elections. Without this provision, there would be no way to prevent new and devious efforts by local officials to block blacks and Hispanics from voting or to reduce their electoral power. In 2006, Congress overwhelmingly reauthorized the statute. It found that these places should remain "covered" by this "preclearance" requirement because voting discrimination remained both tangible and more concentrated and persistent in them than in other parts of the country. House members from those places strongly supported the renewal: of 110 members from covered jurisdictions, 90 voted for reauthorization.
But critics of Section 5 - like Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. - would rather not consider the real-life effects of voting changes on minority voters in historically discriminatory areas. Instead, they frame the issue in the Shelby case as whether Congress was wrong to renew the section "under the pre-existing coverage formula." Their claim is that Section 5 stigmatizes covered districts, so that any such decision must be based on current data about severe discrimination in that place. The chief justice raised doubts about the section's constitutionality in a 2009 Supreme Court opinion that resolved a Texas voting case on narrower grounds. He focused on the formula used in 1965 to determine which states and other places would be covered - places that had used a forbidden test or device in November 1964, like a literacy test or a poll tax, and had less than 50 percent voter registration or turnout in the 1964 presidential election. The statute's coverage formula, he wrote, "is based on data that is now more than 35 years old, and there is considerable evidence that it fails to account for current political conditions."
While the method for identifying the places to be covered is partly based on information from decades ago, that should not render the law's current enforcement unconstitutional. In 2006, Congress did not mechanically accept the pre-existing formula. Instead, it held extensive hearings about discrimination in voting - gathering a mountain of evidence accounting for current political conditions.
F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., the conservative Republican congressman from Wisconsin who introduced the reauthorization bill in the House, addressed the coverage issue then. "The existing formula triggering coverage under the Voting Rights Act is not at all outdated in any meaningful sense of the term, and states covered are not unfairly punished under the coverage formula," he said. The reauthorization was "based on recent and proven instances of discrimination in voting rights compiled in the judiciary committee's 12,000-page record" - not counting the 3,000-page record of the Senate.
Congress found that, in general, the problems of voting discrimination were much worse in the covered areas than elsewhere in the United States. A recent study by Morgan Kousser of the California Institute of Technology confirms that: "five-sixths or more of the cases of proven election discrimination from 1957 through 2013 have taken place in jurisdictions subject to Section 5 oversight." The Justice Department used Section 5 last year to block and change discriminatory voter ID laws in Texas and South Carolina, for example, and to block a discriminatory Florida law that limited early voting.
Nonetheless, the lawyer for Shelby County told the justices the "problem to which the Voting Rights Act was addressed is solved." Justice Antonin Scalia, saying that Section 5 is a "perpetuation of racial entitlement," outrageously suggested that minority voters in covered districts are getting something they do not deserve - protection of their right to vote. Congress exercised its constitutional authority in carefully and deliberately renewing Section 5. If the Supreme Court substitutes its judgment for Congress's, it will enable state and local governments to erode nearly half a century of civil rights gains.
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FOCUS | Woodward Goes Wingnut |
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Thursday, 28 February 2013 12:45 |
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Yglesias writes: "As if determined to prove Sperling right, Woodward chose to start talking around town about how Sperling had threatened him - a ridiculous interpretation that the ridiculous conservative media has been running with - rather than sticking with the obvious interpretation that Woodward's reputation among journalists is going to suffer from flagrant wrongness."
Associate Editor of the Washington Post Bob Woodward speaks at the Newseum during an event marking the 40th anniversary of Watergate at the Newseum in Washington, DC June 13, 2012. (photo: Jim Watson/AFP/GettyImages)
Woodward Goes Wingnut
By Matthew Yglesias, Slate Magazine
28 February 13
 ob Woodward, the legendary Watergate reporter turned reliable chronicler of insider accounts of political events, has made a series of bizarre assertions over the past week.
It started with Woodward's odd weekend assertion that the White House is trying "to move the goalposts" by replacing sequestration with a deficit reduction package that includes tax hikes. The idea of sequestration was always that it was something elected officials were going to want to replace with alternative deficit reduction. Republicans have been trying to replace it with a package of cuts targeted at income support programs for the poor. Obama's been trying to replace it with a mixture of spending cuts and tax hikes. Either everyone's moving the goalposts (which I think is tendentious but even-handed) or no one is moving them. But it really intensified Wednesday morning when Woodward went on Morning Joe to suggest it's crazy of Obama to be applying the law as written to the military, instead of simply ignoring it.
Things moved into the absurd Wednesday night when it was revealed that National Economic Council director Gene Sperling had concluded an email disagreement with Woodward with the observation that in Sperling's view Woodward would come to regret clinging so tenaciously to an untenable position.
Things moved into the absurd Wednesday night when it was revealed that National Economic Council director Gene Sperling had concluded an email disagreement with Woodward with the observation that in Sperling's view Woodward would come to regret clinging so tenaciously to an untenable position.
As if determined to prove Sperling right, Woodward chose to start talking around town about how Sperling had threatened him - a ridiculous interpretation that the ridiculous conservative media has been running with - rather than sticking with the obvious interpretation that Woodward's reputation among journalists is going to suffer from flagrant wrongness. It would be interesting to see Woodward try to hash this out with, say, fellow Post-ie Ezra Klein, but instead he's going the full wingnut and will be appearing on Sean Hannity's show Thursday night to advance the agitprop agenda. In retrospect, this whole affair was foreshadowed by the release of Woodward's latest book last fall. It made much less of a splash than many other Woodward books. Most well-informed observers agreed with Noam Scheiber that it was marred by anti-Obama bias, but under the circumstances of the time, it didn't get the right geared up either. By essentially doubling down on the worst qualities of that book, Woodward has managed to make himself the center of attention again.
But none of this changes the fact that we are facing cuts in government spending that are projected to harm the economy in the short term without doing anything to improve the long-term budget picture. The White House wants to replace those cuts with a balanced package of spending cuts and tax hikes. Republicans are insisting on an all-cuts package. It's not a very complicated debate. It just happens to be that the Democratic position is much more popular than the Republican position, so clear statements of what's happening tend to put the GOP at a disadvantage. Woodward's epic week of attention-grabbing tends to obscure the underlying clear issue - are all cuts and no tax hikes better, or is a mix of cuts and tax hikes better?
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