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FOCUS: The Party That Can't Say Yes |
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Saturday, 23 July 2011 14:05 |
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Intro: "... on the eve of economic calamity, the Republicans killed an overly generous deal largely over a paltry $400 billion in deductions.... If last-ditch talks beginning Saturday fail, they will have to take responsibility if the unimaginable - a government default - happens in 10 days and the checks stop going out."
House Speaker John Boehner (center) walks with chief of staff Barry Jackson (left) on Friday after making a statement on Capitol Hill about the breakdown of debt-ceiling talks with the White House, 07/22/11. (photo: Alex Brandon/AP)
The Party That Can't Say Yes
By The New York Times | Editorial
23 July 11
 or days, the White House has infuriated its Democratic allies in Congress by offering House Republicans more and more in exchange for a deal to raise the debt ceiling and prevent default. But it was never enough, and, on Friday evening, it became clear that it may never be enough. Speaker John Boehner again walked away from the "grand bargain" he had been negotiating with President Obama, leaving the country teetering on the brink of another economic collapse.
At the White House podium a few minutes later, the president radiated a righteous fury he rarely displays in public, finally placing the blame for this wholly unnecessary crisis squarely where it belongs: on Republicans who will do anything to upend his presidency and dismantle every social program they can find. "Can they say yes to anything?" he asked, noting the paradox of Republicans, who claim that financial responsibility and debt reduction are their biggest priorities, rejecting yet another deal that would have cut that debt by at least $3 trillion.
Mr. Obama, in fact, had already gone much too far in trying to make his deal palatable to House Republicans, offering to cut spending even further than the deficit plan proposed this week by the bipartisan "Gang of Six," which includes some of the Senate's most conservative members. The White House was willing to cut $1 trillion in domestic and defense spending and another $650 billion from Medicare, Medicaid and even Social Security.
Much of that savings would have come from raising the eligibility age for Medicare benefits and reducing the cost-of-living increases that elderly people depend on when receiving their health and pension benefits. It could have caused significant damage to some of the nation's most vulnerable people.
The "bargain" would require that alongside these cuts, tax revenues would go up by $1.2 trillion, largely through a rewrite of the tax code to eliminate many deductions and loopholes. That's substantially less in revenue than the $2 trillion in the "Gang of Six" plan. The problem is that while much of the cutting would start right away, most of the revenue increases would be put off, in part because a tax-code revision would take months, and in part to allow House Republicans to say they did not agree to any specific tax revenue increases.
Democratic lawmakers were rightly furious when they heard about these details this week, calling the plan wholly unbalanced. But, in the end, it was Mr. Boehner who torpedoed the talks. He said Friday evening that he and the president had come close to agreeing on $800 billion of the revenue increases (the equivalent of letting the upper-income Bush tax cuts expire as scheduled next year - not much of a heavy lift) but could not stomach another $400 billion the White House wanted to raise through ending tax loopholes and deductions.
So, on the eve of economic calamity, the Republicans killed an overly generous deal largely over a paltry $400 billion in deductions. Mr. Obama was willing to take considerable heat from his liberal critics over the deal, and the Republicans were not willing to do a thing to anger their Tea Party base. As the president forcefully said, there is no evidence that House Republicans are capable of making those tough decisions. If last-ditch talks beginning Saturday fail, they will have to take responsibility if the unimaginable - a government default - happens in 10 days and the checks stop going out.
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Obama Gutting Core Principles of Democratic Party |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=7181"><span class="small">Glenn Greenwald, Guardian UK</span></a>
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Thursday, 21 July 2011 19:09 |
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Excerpt: "The same Democratic president who supported the transfer of $700 billion to bail out Wall Street banks, who earlier this year signed an extension of Bush's massive tax cuts for the wealthy, and who has escalated America's bankruptcy-inducing posture of Endless War, is now trying to reduce the debt by cutting benefits for America's most vulnerable - at the exact time that economic insecurity and income inequality are at all-time highs."
President Barack Obama. (photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images)
Obama Gutting Core Principles of Democratic Party
By Glenn Greenwald, Guardian UK
21 July 11
The president's attacks on America's social safety net are destroying the soul of the Democratic party's platform.
 n 2005, American liberals achieved one of their most significant political victories of the last decade. It occurred with the resounding rejection of George W Bush's campaign to privatise social security.
Bush's scheme would have gutted the crux of that entitlement programme by converting it from what it has been since the 1940s - a universal guarantor of minimally decent living conditions for America's elderly - into a Wall Street casino and bonanza.
Progressive activists and bloggers relentlessly attacked both the plan and underlying premises (the myth that social security faces a "crisis"), spawning nationwide opposition. Only a few months after he unveiled his scheme to great fanfare, Bush was forced to sheepishly withdraw it, a defeat he described as his biggest failure.
That victory established an important political fact. While there are very few unifying principles for the Democratic party, one (arguably the primary one) is a steadfast defence of basic entitlement programs for the poor and elderly - social security, Medicare and Medicaid - from the wealthy, corporatised factions that have long targeted them for cuts.
But in 2009, clear signs emerged that President Obama was eager to achieve what his right-predecessor could not: cut social security. Before he was even inaugurated, Obama echoed the right's manipulative rhetorical tactic: that (along with Medicare) the programme was in crisis and producing "red ink as far as the eye can see." President-elect Obama thus vowed that these crown jewels of his party since the New Deal would be, as Politico reported, a "central part" of his efforts to reduce the deficit.
The next month, his top economic adviser, the Wall Street-friendly Larry Summers, also vowed specific benefit cuts to Time magazine. He then stacked his "deficit commission" with long-time advocates of social security cuts.
Many progressives, ebullient over the election of a Democratic president, chose to ignore these preliminary signs, unwilling to believe that their own party's leader was as devoted as he claimed to attacking the social safety net. But some were more realistic. The popular liberal blogger and economist Duncan "Atrios" Black, who was one of the leaders of the campaign against Bush's privatisation scheme, vowed in response to these early reports:
The left ... will create an epic 360-degree shitstorm if Obama and the Dems decide that cutting social security benefits is a good idea.
Fast forward to 2011: it is now beyond dispute that President Obama not only favours, but is the leading force in Washington pushing for, serious benefit cuts to both social security and Medicare.
This week, even as GOP leaders offered schemes to raise the debt ceiling with no cuts, the White House expressed support for the Senate's so-called "gang of six" plan that includes substantial cuts in those programmes.
The same Democratic president who supported the transfer of $700bn to bail out Wall Street banks, who earlier this year signed an extension of Bush's massive tax cuts for the wealthy, and who has escalated America's bankruptcy-inducing posture of Endless War, is now trying to reduce the debt by cutting benefits for America's most vulnerable - at the exact time that economic insecurity and income inequality are at all-time highs.
Where is the "epic shitstorm" from the left which Black predicted? With a few exceptions - the liberal blog FiredogLake has assembled 50,000 Obama supporters vowing to withhold re-election support if he follows through, and a few other groups have begun organising as well - it's nowhere to be found.
Therein lies one of the most enduring attributes of Obama's legacy: in many crucial areas, he has done more to subvert and weaken the left's political agenda than a GOP president could have dreamed of achieving. So potent, so overarching, are tribal loyalties in American politics that partisans will support, or at least tolerate, any and all policies their party's leader endorses - even if those policies are ones they long claimed to loathe.
This dynamic has repeatedly emerged in numerous contexts. Obama has continued Bush/Cheney terrorism policies - once viciously denounced by Democrats - of indefinite detention, renditions, secret prisons by proxy, and sweeping secrecy doctrines.
He has gone further than his predecessor by waging an unprecedented war on whistleblowers, seizing the power to assassinate U.S. citizens without due process far from any battlefield, massively escalating drone attacks in multiple nations, and asserting the authority to unilaterally prosecute a war (in Libya) even in defiance of a Congressional vote against authorising the war.
And now he is devoting all of his presidential power to cutting the entitlement programmes that have been the defining hallmark of the Democratic party since Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. The silence from progressive partisans is defeaning - and depressing, though sadly predictable.
The nature of American politics is that once a policy is removed from the partisan wars - once it is adopted by the leadership of both parties - it is removed from mainstream debate and fortified as bipartisan consensus. That is why false claims in the run-up to the Iraq war, endorsed by both parties, received so little mainstream journalistic scrutiny. And it's why the former Bush lawyer and right-wing ideologue Jack Goldsmith - back in May 2009 - celebrated in The New Republic the fact that Obama was doing more to strengthen Bush/Cheney terrorism policies than his former bosses could have ever achieved: by embracing the very terrorism approach he once denounced, Obama was converting it from rightwing radicalism into into the official dogma of both parties, and forcing his supporters to defend what were, until 2009, the symbols of rightwing evil.
Identically, Obama is now on the verge of injecting what until recently was the politically toxic and unattainable dream of Wall Street and the American right - attacks on the nation's social safety net - into the heart and soul of the Democratic party's platform. Those progressives who are guided more by party loyalty than actual belief will seamlessly transform from virulent opponents of such cuts into their primary defenders.
And thus will Obama succeed - yet again - in gutting not only core Democratic policies, but also the identity and power of the American Left.
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"This Senator Is Going to Fight Back" |
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Thursday, 21 July 2011 11:12 |
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Bernie Sanders writes: "This senator is going to fight back. I was not elected to the United States Senate to make devastating cuts in Social Security, in Medicare, in Medicaid, in children's programs while lowering tax rates for the wealthiest people in this country."
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). (photo: WDCpix)
"This Senator Is Going to Fight Back"
By Sen. Bernie Sanders, Reader Supported News
21 July 11
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8cmEoER6Ic
Congratulations Senator Coburn.
f there was ever a time in the modern history of America that the American people should become engaged in what's going on here in Washington, now is that time. Decisions are being made that will impact not only our generation but the lives of our children and our grandchildren for decades to come, and I fear very much that the decisions being contemplated are not good decisions, are not fair decisions.
There is increased understanding that that defaulting for the first time in our history on our debts would be a disaster for the American economy and for the world's economy. We should not do that.
There also is increased discussion about long-term deficit reduction and how we address the crisis which we face today of a record-breaking deficit of $1.4 trillion and a $14 trillion-plus national debt.
One of the long-term deficit reduction plans came from the so-called Gang of Six. We do not know all of the details of that proposal. In fact, we never will know because a lot of the decisions are booted to committees to work out the details.
It is fair to say, however, that Senators Coburn, Crapo and Chambliss deserve congratulations. Clearly, they have won this debate in a very significant way. My guess is that they will probably get 80 percent or 90 percent of what they wanted. In this town, that is quite an achievement, but they have stood firm in their desire to represent the wealthy and the powerful and multinational corporations. They have threatened. They have been smart. They have been determined. And at the end of the day, they will get almost all of what they want. That is their victory, and I congratulate them.
Unfortunately, their victory will be a disaster for working families in this country, for the elderly, for the sick, for the children and for low-income people.
Based on the limited information that we have, I think it is important to highlight some of what is in this so-called Gang of Six proposal that the corporate media, among others, are enthralled about.
Some may remember that for a number of years, leading Democrats said that we will do everything that we can to protect Social Security, that Social Security has been an extraordinary success in our country, that for 75 years, with such volatility in the economy, Social Security has paid out every nickel owed to every eligible American. I heard Democrats say that Social Security has nothing to do with the deficit. That is right because Social Security is funded by the payroll tax, not by the US Treasury. Social Security has a $2.6 trillion surplus today. It can pay out every benefit owed to every eligible American for the next 25 years. It is an enormously popular program. Poll after poll from the American people says doesn't cut Social Security. Two and a half years ago when Barack Obama, then a senator from Illinois, ran for president of the United States, he made it very clear if you voted for him there would be no cuts in Social Security.
What Senators Coburn, Crapo and Chambliss have managed to do in the Gang of Six is reach an agreement where there will be major cuts in Social Security. Don't let anybody kid you about this being some minor thing. It is not. What we are talking about is that Social Security cuts would go into effect virtually immediately. Ten years from now, the typical 75-year-old person will see their Social Security benefits cut by $560 a year. The average 85-year-old will see a cut of $1,000 a year. Now, for some people here in Washington, maybe the big lobbyists who make hundreds of thousands a year, $560 a year or $1,000 a year may not seem like a lot of money, but if you are a senior trying to get by on $14,000, $15,000, $18,000 a year and you're 85 years old, the end of your life, you're totally vulnerable, you're sick - a $1,000 per year cut in what you otherwise would have received is a major, major blow.
So I congratulate Senator Coburn, Senator Crapo, Senator Chambliss for doing what president Obama said would not happen under his watch, what the Democrats have said would not happen under their watch.
But it's not just Social Security. We have 50 million Americans today who have no health insurance at all. Under the Gang of Six proposals, there will be cuts in Medicare over a 10-year period of almost $300 billion. There will be massive cuts in Medicaid and other health care programs. There will be caps on spending, which mean that there will be major cuts in education. If you are a working-class family, hoping that you're going to be able to send your kid to college and thinking that you will be eligible for a Pell grant, think twice about that. Pell grants may not be there. If you're a senior who relies on a nutrition program, that nutrition program may not be there. If you think it's a good idea that we enforce clean air and clean water provisions so that our kids can be healthy, those provisions may not be there because there will be major cuts in environmental protection.
Some people think that's not so good, but at least our Republican friends are saying we need revenue and we're going to get $1 trillion in revenue. But wait a minute,. If you read the proposal, there are very, very clear provisions making sure that we are going to make massive cuts in programs for working families, for the elderly, for the children. Those cuts are written in black and white. What about the revenue? Well, it's kind of vague. The projection is that we would rise over a 10-year period $100 billion in revenue. Where is that going to come? Is it necessarily going to come from the wealthiest people in this economy? Is it going to come from large corporations who are enjoying huge tax breaks? That is not clear at all. I want middle-class families to understand that when we talk about increased revenues, do you know where that comes from? It may come from cutbacks in the home mortgage interest deduction program, which is so very important to millions and millions of families. It may mean that if you have a health care program today, that health care program may be taxed. That's a way to raise revenue. It may be that there will be increased taxes on your retirement programs, your IRA's, your 401(k)'s. But we don't have the details for that. All we have is some kind of vague promise that we're going to raise $1 trillion over the next 10 years, no enforcement mechanism and no clarity as to where that revenue will come from.
That is why it is so terribly important that the American people become engaged in this debate which will have a huge impact on them, on their parents and on their children. The American people must fight for a fair deal. At a time when the wealthiest people in this country are doing phenomenally well and their effective tax rate is the lowest on record, at a time when the top 400 individuals in this country own more wealth than 150 million Americans, at a time when corporate profits are soaring and in many instances corporations, these same corporations pay nothing in taxes, at a time when we have tripled military spending since 1997, there are fair ways to move toward deficit reduction which do not slash programs that working families and children and the elderly desperately depend upon.
This Senator is going to fight back. I was not elected to the United States Senate to make devastating cuts in Social Security, in Medicare, in Medicaid, in children's programs, while lowering tax rates for the wealthiest people in this country.
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Disaster Warning on 'Gang of Six' |
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Wednesday, 20 July 2011 18:45 |
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Intro: "The latest idea to emerge in negotiations over a deficit-reduction package came from a group of senators that calls itself the Gang of Six. The proposal would be a disaster."
Five members of the 'Gang of Six.' From left: Senators Kent Conrad, Mike Crapo, Mark Warner, Dick Durbin and Tom Coburn. Not pictured: Sen. Saxy Chambliss. (photo: Common Dreams)
Disaster Warning on 'Gang of Six'
By Sen. Bernie Sanders, Reader Supported News
20 July 11
Disaster Warning: 'Gang of Six' deal sacrifices Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid to GOP madness.
 he latest idea to emerge in negotiations over a deficit-reduction package came from a group of senators that calls itself the Gang of Six. The proposal would be a disaster, Sen. Bernie Sanders warned. "The plan would result in devastating cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and many other programs that are of vital importance to working families in this country. Meanwhile, tax rates would be lowered for the wealthiest people and the largest, most profitable corporations."
"This is an approach that should be rejected by the American people. At a time when the rich are becoming richer and corporate profits are soaring, at least half of any deficit-reduction package must come from upper income people and profitable corporations. We must also take a hard look at military spending, which has tripled since 1997."
Summary of the "Gang of Six Plan"
Provides Major Tax Cuts to the Wealthy and Large Corporations.
- The Gang of Six plan reduces the top marginal income tax rate for the wealthiest Americans and most profitable corporations from 35 percent to as low as 23 percent (about 34 percent lower than the top tax rates under Bush).
- Instead of reforming the Alternative Minimum Tax, it abolishes it altogether providing a major tax cut for the wealthiest Americans.
- It reduces the deficit by about $3.7 trillion over 10 years, while providing a net tax cut of $1.5 trillion that will mainly go to the wealthiest Americans and most profitable corporations.
- In other words, 100 percent of the deficit reduction achieved by the Gang of Six plan is through spending cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, education, child care, Head Start, LIHEAP, the environment, and other programs that the sick, the elderly, the children, and working families need.
- Any tax revenue that is raised by closing tax loopholes for large corporations must be used to lower tax rates.
- Revenue raisers cannot be used to increase spending at all. Revenue raisers can only be used to lower tax rates or reduce the deficit.
Reduces the Deficit on the Backs of the Elderly, the Children, the Sick, and Working Families.
- It imposes undefined spending caps to be in effect until at least 2015 that could only be raised by 67 votes in the Senate.
Immediately Reduces Cost of Living Adjustments for Social Security Benefits.
- Even though Social Security recipients haven't gotten a COLA for 2 straight years, the Gang of Six believes that the formula for calculating COLAs is too generous.
- Under their plan, they would ensure that seniors never get a fair COLA by shifting to the Chained-CPI which would significantly understate inflation for seniors.
- Under the Gang of Six plan, ten years from now the typical 75-year-old will see their Social Security benefits cut by $560 a year, and the average 85-year-old will see a cut of $1,000 a year.
Slashes Medicare.
- Cuts Medicare by at least $298 billion over 10 years.
Holds Deficit Reduction Hostage to Cutting Social Security Benefits.
- If the Gang of Six deficit reduction plan receives 60 votes, it will not be sent to the House until and unless the Senate also adopts a plan to reform Social Security so that it is solvent for the next 75 years.
- If 60 Senators don't vote to approve an undefined 75-year Social Security solvency bill, the deficit reduction plan dies, even if 60 Senators voted to approve it.
- Social Security is solvent for the next 25 years. No other government program can make that claim.
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ew York: During World War II, the Japanese deployed units of pilots who turned their planes into bombs and sacrificed themselves in the name of their emperor in a holy war against US ships. They would aim for the deck of aircraft carriers and do as much damage as they could at the cost of their equipment and their lives.
