Month: December 2008

Good

by digby

I had a visceral reaction the other day against the move by the Illinois Attorney General to have Blogojevich removed by the state supremes. I just don’t like undemocratic end runs in these highly charged situations, no matter who is doing it.

The court apparently agreed. So now we let the system do its work, which requires that the Governor gets to tell his side of the story and present himself for judgment both by his fellow politicos in Springfield and a jury of his peers. Blagojevich should resign for the good of the state, of course, but he certainly has a right to fight this is he wants to. The state will survive.

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American Albatross

by digby

In case you wonder what the political media’s priorities are, look no further than today’s First Read, the “blog” of Chuck Todd and his minions at NBC. Here is the first post this morning:

From Chuck Todd, Mark Murray, Domenico Montanaro, and Carrie Dann
*** The Dem albatross: Just six weeks have passed since Election Day. But with the Blagojevich scandal still dominating the political news, the TV ads haven’t stopped. Yesterday, we reported that the pro-business group Americans for Job Security is up with an ad in Arkansas, Nebraska, and North Dakota — states with conservative- to moderate-leaning Democratic senators (including two up for re-election in 2010) — that links Blago with SEIU in the business group’s campaign against a union-backed measure that would overhaul labor law and forbid employers from mandating that workers cast secret ballots in union negotiations. And now the Illinois GOP has a new TV ad demanding a special election for Obama’s Senate seat rather than an appointment. What if F-Rod doesn’t leave office soon? Won’t he be an easy target for quite some time? This is the frustration Obama’s team and congressional Democrats are feeling right now. Blago’s a distraction that will keep on giving to the GOP. NBC Deputy Political Director Mark Murray offers his first read on concerns about a relationship between Ill. Gov. Rod Blagojevich and Barack Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel.

*** More F-Rod: Here are more developments in the Blagojevich scandal. The legislative panel considering the governor’s impeachment reconvenes today for its first day of testimony, with Blago’s attorney present… We learned that Jesse Jackson Jr. has been sharing information about public corruption with federal investigators for years… Chicago Sun-Times columnist Michael Sneed notes — in a 44-word item — that Rahm Emanuel “is reportedly on 21 different taped conversations by the feds,” but an Obama source tells NBC’s Savannah Guthrie that the report is inaccurate… Another Sun-Times piece notes that Rahm was pushing for Valerie Jarrett to replace Obama (until Jarrett took her name out of contention). Next week, the Obama folks are going to need to allow both Rahm and Jarrett to explain when and why she took her name out to clean up the timing issue… And Obama sidestepped questions about Blagojevich at his press conference yesterday. “Let me just cut you off,” he told a Chicago Tribune reporter, “because I don’t want you to waste your question. As I indicated yesterday, we’ve done a full review of this. The facts are going to be released next week… So do you have another question?”

This has taken on a life of it’s own.

AB Stoddard of The Hill laid it all out on MSNBC this morning:

Contessa Brewer: Obama is really trying to stay on message here except the press corps is dropping daily hints that the honeymoon may be over … AB stoddard, editor of The Hill is here. AB what were seeing in these news conferences, is that the amount of time Obama is willing to spend in Q and A sessions with reporters is getting shorter and shorter. What’s the motive for Obama here in trying to keep these short and succinct?

Stoddard: Obviously he hopes that every time he rolls out a nominee, they’re only going to talk about that and as you see he’s calling on regional press hoping that they’ll be talking about regional issues related to those nominations. And he going to get Blagojevich questions every single time he comes out in public until they release these findings.

They’ve pushed that off until next week and you know, according to The Wall Street Journal yesterday, they’re just choosing to do this. They’re choosing not to talk. There is no legal impediment and no injunction against them. Although Patrick Fitzgerald doesn’t want them to talk, they’re not legally kept from doing so. They’re not. They’re choosing not to talk. So in some ways, Barack Obama is doing this to himself. He keeps getting those questions and it’s going to be a feeding frenzy next week.

Brewer: And it’s leaving room, time to ponder and question and time for doubts to arise. And, in fact, we’re seeing this new Marist poll which says that Americans feel the Obama transition is on the right track. [61%] Now that’s pretty good. But an NBC/Wall Street journal poll earlier that number was more like three fourths of the people who were responding.

Is the Blagojevich scandal and the surrounding questions, no matter what the answers are, if they remain unanswered, is it likely to affect how people view this transition?

Stoddard: Absolutely. If next week, Christmas week, we find out that no one did anything wrong and, in fact they alerted the feds about anything they knew and they’re totally clean, even if Rod Blagojevich doubled down and it remains a story perhaps it’s going to go away as a major distraction for Barack Obama.

However, the question that people are not asking about Rahm Emmanuel — it doesn’t matter that he talked 20 times or 40 times about the senate seat. The question is, if he didn’t engage in deal making, if he knew that Rod Blagojevich was trying to sell the seat, did he alert the authorities? If we find out that he did not, he may not be in legal jeopardy, but then you have a serious political problem for the chief of staff and a serious political problem for the president if he keeps him on as chief of staff.

Brewer: You just said the question that is not being asked. I know that there are journalists who are taking a lot of heat for not being aggressive and tough with Obama. Do you agree? And if you had the opportunity, what’s the one question right now that you would demand that he answer?

Stoddard: That would be the question — “if Rahm Emmanuel did not engage in deal making when he spoke to the Governor of Illinois about your successor to the senate, did he alert the authorities?” Did he tip off the feds that Rod Blagojevich was looking for goodies in exchange for the seat. And if he didn’t, why not? That is the question that has to be answered. Again, I want to repeat, maybe not a legal question — he has a lawyer but he might not be in legal jeopardy — and I believe Rahm Emmanuel and Patrick Fitzgerald when they say, “no one’s done anything inappropriate” but if Rahm Emmanuel then just sat there and didn’t tell the authorities that Rod Balgojevich was looking for prizes, then that’s a huge political problem for both him and his boss.

You’ll notice that Stoddard just moved the goal posts quite a way down the field. It’s no longer a matter of legal or ethical wrongdoing. It’s about whether or not Rahm (or any other name that comes up) reported his conversations to the feds. And what’s really awesome about this is that the press gets to decide whether or not he should have done it because there’s no legal obligation. And if by some chance the rest of the conversations are made public, they get to decide what constitutes “appropriate” and whether they should have ben reported in order to pass the smell test. They will also tell us whether or not Obama himself “should have known” and speculate endlessly about what this whole thing says about his “ability to lead.” It’s a dream come true.

Two more things stuck out at me about that exchange. First, Brewer brings up something that I’ve now heard half a dozen times on MSNBC by various talking heads: reporters are “taking a lot of heat” for not being aggressive enough toward Obama. Taking heat from whom?

I expected that after the election the press would come under pressure exactly like this. It’s a classic “work the refs” move. But the press is openly using it as an excuse for their own behavior, which is new and changed the rules, it seems to me. While they are haranguing Obama for failing to answer questions, they seem to think it’s fine not to reveal who is pressuring reporters to harangue him. Maybe they need to take some questions themselves.

The other concerning thing is that both Brewer and Stoddard seem to be banking on the public validating their obsession by losing faith in Obama. It’s possible, but in no way is it assured. And the inevitable result of that is to make the press all the more determined to find something that will. They will come to see the president as having some sort of illegitimate hold on the public which must be broken. If it doesn’t take with this scandal, the press will harbor resentment and jump on the next one with even more fervor.

The essential problem is that we all give the press the power to run our politics, both during campaigns and after. We applaud them when they go after those we hate and excoriate them when they go after those we like. And so does the other side. In the end, the media remain in the driver’s seat, ginning up controversy and indulging their passion for worthless speculation and scandalmongering. We give them their power by not holding them to a common standard.

I’m as guilty of this as anyone, but I regret it. They are always going to be harder on Democrats than Republicans because there are corporate pressures as well as institutional and social pressures to do so. And frankly, DC Dems just don’t have the killer instinct or the establishment clout to put the same kind of “pressure” on the press as the Republicans do. Until the press is reformed it remains an albatross around the neck of the American body politic.

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The Republican War On Labor

by dday

It’s pretty clear that the GOP desire to stiff the auto companies had little to do with bailing out GM and Chrysler per se, and everything to do with busting unions. GOP lawmakers made it fairly explicit in their internal deliberations that this was a union fight, and they also characterized it as the first round of the battle against the Employee Free Choice Act:

Handing a defeat to labor and its Democratic allies in Congress was also seen as a preemptive strike in what is expected to be a major battle for the new Congress in January: the unions’ bid for a so-called card check law that would make it easier for them to organize workers, potentially reversing decades of declining power. The measure is strongly opposed by business groups.

“This is the Democrats’ first opportunity to pay off organized labor after the election,” read an e-mail circulated Wednesday among Senate Republicans. “This is a precursor to card check and other items. Republicans should stand firm and take their first shot against organized labor, instead of taking their first blow from it.”

One of the leading opponents of the auto bailout, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), said: “Year after year, union bosses have put their interests ahead of the workers they claim to represent. Congress never should have given these unions this much power, and now is the time to fix it.”

Congress didn’t “give” unions anything, of course. Workers took their rights to organize through concerted effort and mass action. Congress helped set labor law designed to stop them.

(By the way, make this guy the Labor Secretary, President-elect Obama. Make it happen today.)

Morgan Johnson, president of the United Auto Workers local representing General Motors workers in Shreveport, said Friday that Sen. David Vitter’s role in blocking an auto bailout indicates “he’s chosen to play Russian roulette” with Louisiana jobs and the national economy.

“I don’t know what Sen. Vitter has against GM or the United Auto Workers or the entire domestic auto industry; whatever it is, whatever he thinks we’ve done, it’s time for him to forgive us, just like Sen. Vitter has asked the citizens of Louisiana to forgive him, ” said Johnson, president of Local 2166. Otherwise, Johnson said of Vitter, it would appear, “He’d rather pay a prostitute than pay auto workers.”

But the fearmongering, the demonization of unions that found a home on talk radio, worked at least in part in this case. In part the Southern rump wanted to let their nonunion auto factories in Dixie flourish, but obviously Republicans want to protect their corporate allies and stop the gains of the labor movement over the last decade. They see it as poisonous to corporate profits and deadly to their political futures, as union households historically vote Democratic.

Now we’re seeing this fight over EFCA become even more pronounced. This latest ad tries to associate the Blagojevich scandal with “union bosses” And I think you’ll see whatever other scandal of the moment attached to labor, to continue to cement an image in the public mind that unions are the problem.

Kicking off what promises to be a huge fight over labor’s top legislative priority, a pro-business group is sinking over a million dollars into a TV ad campaign tying Rod Blagojevich to “union bosses” and calling on Democratic Senators in four states to oppose the Employee Free Choice Act.

The ad — which was sent over by a source and hasn’t been released to the press — seeks to tar the Employee Free Choice Act as vaguely corrupt-sounding by tying it rather tangentially to the Blago mess. It’s being aired by Americans for Job Security, a business-funded group that is expected to spend big money to sink the Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it easier for unions to organize and is labor’s top goal for 2009.

(Amusing that the target in this version of the ad, Ken Salazar, is now the Secretary of the Interior nominee and will not have a vote.)

Meanwhile, the head lobbyist for pro-business interests is Rick Berman, a Washington fixture who reads like somebody out of a Christopher Buckley novel:

Berman, hired by businesses, fights efforts such as further restricting drinking and driving, mandating healthier foods and raising the minimum wage. The former labor relations lawyer argues that many of the restrictions reduce our ability to make our own choices.

He seldom mentions his clients, other than to say many are in the food and restaurant industries, and he represents them through a variety of non-profit groups he has set up. His targets range from Mothers Against Drunk Driving to the Ralph Nader-founded Center for Science in the Public Interest, which works on food issues, to labor unions…

Berman spent the last couple of years fighting obesity-focused trial lawyers and consumer groups who have succeeded in getting trans fats out of many foods and soft-drink machines out of schools — the latter a move he finds ludicrous because high-calorie juice is allowed and diet drinks aren’t.

Currently, he’s predicting that when they’re done with fat, the food-safety groups will focus more on demonizing caffeine. And MADD, he says, won’t be happy until there is a breathalyzer in every car and social drinkers are scared into public sobriety.

Berman expects to raise $30 million dollars to fight the EFCA, and his efforts have already gotten one Democrat to waver, not surprisingly a Senator from the land of Wal-Mart.

Sen. Blanche Lincoln says she doesn’t think federal legislation that would allow labor organizations to unionize workplaces without secret-ballot elections is necessary. But in an interview with The Associated Press today, Lincoln gave herself room to support the measure if it’s brought up later.

Business and labor groups are pressuring the Democratic senator from Arkansas for support either way. Tim Griffin, a potential challenger to the senator’s 2010 re-election bid, has said her stand could be an issue in the race.

That’s right, Karl Rove’s protégé Tim Griffin, the man responsible for voter caging in Florida in 2004, and a key part of the US Attorney scandal, is mulling a run for Senate. And he’s putting union jobs at the heart of his campaign. Because the biggest issue facing America is that some in the working class just make too much darn money.

There are extremely powerful forces seeking to block the Employee Free Choice Act. We have nothing on our side but people power. SEIU is planning events where ordinary people speak directly with McDonald’s employees tomorrow, asking them “what it’s like to work for a CEO who is paid 770 times what his workers earn, leaving working families with barely enough to afford the ‘Dollar Menu.'” You can find an event in your areahere.

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Industry Moles

by dday

The Obama transition team is having people organize house parties to give their thoughts on health care reform. They are open, deliberative processes. So of course the insurance industry is seeking to sabotage them.

The health insurance industry is encouraging its employees and satisfied customers to attend. A trade group representing some of the nation’s largest health care businesses, including drug companies, is organizing several meetings. The American Medical Association and other medical societies are encouraging doctors to get involved.

The Maine Medical Association will convene a community discussion on Dec. 30. Group Health Cooperative of Seattle has sent e-mail messages to 35,000 subscribers encouraging their participation, and one of its doctors plans to lead a session next Tuesday.

The meetings, originally envisioned as a way to make good on Mr. Obama’s commitment to “health care reform that comes from the ground up,” could thus turn into living-room lobbying sessions involving some of the biggest stakeholders in the health care industry.

In general this is highly unlikely to really accomplish anything; it’s a lot easier to bullshit politicians than your friends and neighbors, especially when everyone has personal experience interfacing with our broken health care system. I think that it’s a very positive sign that the industry thinks they have to show up to these things at all. In another time, community meetings would not be seen as a threat to their business model. What this signals to me is that the industry is worried about the seriousness of the Obama team to overhaul health care, and they’re trying whatever they can think of to subvert it.

Ultimately, I think they’ll have to relent, but they’ll key in on one element of the plan and target it for elimination: the public option. My own qualified support for what’s been floating around in Democratic circles – the shared responsibility plan that is not single payer – relies on that public option (as well as serious, legitimate cost controls). If it goes, that would be a major setback to reform and would make the overall plan little more than a forced market funneling consumers to insurers.

Republicans also debated whether one aspect of Obama’s health care proposal, giving people the option of buying a public health care plan, would weaken the private insurance market.

Mark Hayes, a Republican health policy adviser to the Senate Finance Committee, said Republicans have concerns because the government plan might have access to price controls and other tools not available to private insurers. This could lead to lower premiums in the government plan, which would cause most consumers to migrate out of the private market, he said.

“Over time the effect the government option could have [is an] erosion in the private market, [making] other choices not available,” Hayes said.

Calling this government-backed plan one of the “radioactive fault lines” that has developed in discussions on the overhaul, McDonough suggested Democrats would be willing to look at other options.

“What is the purpose behind the proposal? The purpose . . . is [public plans are] one of the most important devices out there to provide cost accountability,” McDonough said. “Maybe there are other way to achieve those ends.”

Ezra explains that McDonough is John McDonough, Ted Kennedy’s senior health adviser. He appears to be bargaining away the public option EXTREMELY early. Given this, I don’t see why insurers are so keen on astroturfing the community meetings. They may have already won.

This would be a good question for the next round of “Open for Questions” at the President-elect’s website.

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Newtie’s Lesson

by digby

Back in 1998 Newt Gingrich made a fatal decision to allow the Lewinsky scandal to be used in the midterm elections despite the fact that the public supported Clinton and the press was already acting like slavering beasts day in and day out on the subject. He had expected that they Republicans would gain seats in the election and instead they almost lost their majority. He lost his Speakership.

What he learned was that when the press and outside groups are already doing the job for you, take the high road.

That’s why he’s saying right now that the Republicans should not be so crude as to put out critical Balogojevich-Obama Youtubes under the name of the RNC. It’s not because he’s suddenly discovered ethics or that he thinks that Obama is special. It’s that he sees that the press and the gasbags are running with this anyway and he wants to position the party as acting in good faith. They aren’t, of course, as we saw with the auto bridge loan debacle. But Newtie understands that it’s important to pretend that when they “oppose” it’s for principled reasons rather than obstruction for political gain. Which is, of course, exactly what they are doing.

Never take Newtie at face value. He’s a slime, just as his name suggests. Always has been, always will be.

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Patriots

by digby

Yesterday, today and tomorrow:

Where Lincoln is concerned, no such schism exists. He is “considered by both historians and ordinary Americans to have been the greatest American president,” says the taxpayer-supported website of the Lincoln Bicentennial Commission. Oh, really? Tell that to Bragdon Bowling, commander of the Army of Northern Virginia of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. He won’t be lighting any candles for Abraham Lincoln on Feb. 12.”Lincoln is responsible for the devastation of the founding principles of our country, and you can lay 600,000 bodies at his feet, the casualties of a totally unnecessary war,” Bowling told me. As for the bicentennial, “It’s just a continuation of the Lincoln myth-making paid for with public dollars.”Bowling sounds like an outlier crank, but south of the Mason-Dixon line his views aren’t particularly radical. His anti-Lincoln line springs partly from popular culture, and partly from academic scholarship. In the marketplace of ideas the Lincoln-o-phobes lack the throw weight of, say, David Herbert Donald (of Lincoln, Mass.) or Doris Kearns Goodwin. But they are there, for those who want to hear them.What’s their beef? They view Lincoln as a cynical, self-serving politician with no particular aversion to slavery, who precipitated the Civil War, sorry – the War Against Southern Independence – to keep his Republican party in the White House. “It was all about power,” Bowling observed at an anti-Lincoln rally in Richmond in 2003. “All so Lincoln and his friends could consolidate their power to tell other people how to live their lives.”Former University of South Carolina historian Clyde Wilson particularly objects to the beatification of the 16th president as a genial, all-knowing Christ figure trapped in a bloody hecatomb not of his own making. Writing on the website of the Abbeville Institute, a think tank for revisionist Southern scholarship, Wilson calls Lincoln “the tender-hearted leader who authorized ruthless terrorism against women and children, refused generous offers of prisoner exchange while declaring medicine a contraband of war, accepted Grant’s costly policy of losing three men for every one Confederate killed, was not above keeping his own son out of harm’s way, and invited his own fate by clandestinely organizing the attempted assassination of Jefferson Davis.”Wilson sent me a copy of a forthcoming anti-Lincoln article, timed to coincide with the bicentennial. Inter alia, it reserves particular scorn for Boston, whose citizens, Wilson believes, fanned the flames of war to ensure the economic hegemony of the industrial North over the agrarian South. Yankee hypocrisy is a favorite target: “New England shippers got rich in the illegal African slave trade to Cuba and Brazil right up to The War and Bostonians owned slave sugar plantations in Cuba even after The War,” he writes.Wilson even assails Ms. Julia Ward Howe of Mt. Vernon Street, for the “bigotry and blasphemy” of her composition, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” “She subsumes Christ to her secular vengeance and conquest,” he explained to me. That’s a little rich, I’d say.

I always find it fascinating that the people who want to reach into your bedrooms, hospital rooms and wombs, are always upset about some phantom liberal who supposedly wants to tell them how to live. But it seems to be based upon this odd idea that goes all the way back to the civil war that if a fellow American is not in 100% agreement that they are trying to inflict their “values” on others.

Gay marriage is a good example. Nobody says that people must be gay and must marry others of the same sex. But these people simply can’t live and let live. The mere fact that others don’t believe as they do is seen as a threat and they seek to stop it. And they always do it while excoriating the other side for “seeking power.”

(And the irony of excoriating Lincoln for spilling the blood of hundreds of thousands for immoral reasons in an unnecessary war for the benefit of rich hypocrites who made money arming the enemy is just too rich…)

I don’t know that there are very many of these anti-Lincoln cranks out there. But the underlying philosophy is quite pervasive among conservatives, even if they don’t trace it to Lincoln and the civil war. I recall another conservative from a few years back who also seemed to believe that the Democrats were only interested in power for its own sake:

By “the left” I’m including almost the entire Democratic Party, you can count the exceptions on your fingers, you can name them, Zell Miller, Joe Lieberman…The whole mainstream of the party is engaged in an effort that is a betrayal of America, what they care about is not winning the war on terror…I don’t think they care about the danger to us as Americans or the danger to people in other countries. They care about power.

That’s right. Everyone in the Democratic party was engaged in an effort to betray America because they only care about power. Just like Lincoln and the northerners. I suspect that projection is the foundation of this ongoing sense of conservative victimization. They have to quiet the voices in their own heads by shutting up those who disagree with them.

h/t to bb

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Quote Of The Day

by digby

From Shakes:

And all I could think when I was reading this story was how extraordinarily fucked up it is that, if you want to be a parent, you’re better off being a gay male penguin in China than a gay male human in Arkansas.

Do click over for the sweet story behind that quote.

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Welcome To The ZIRP

by dday

The Federal Reserve cut their key interest rate as low as they can go – virtually to zero, although the bank rate is more like .5%. The investors loved it! Well, today they did, anyway. But this is the final tool in the shed for the Fed, and a zero interest rate policy (or ZIRP!) hasn’t shown much success elsewhere in the world:

There’s a bit of room left to go, since the rate isn’t actually zero, but essentially, the Fed has run out of ability to use standard monetary policy. It’s broken and it doesn’t work anymore. Deflationary expectations have set in, and folks figure that a dollar a year from now will be worth more than dollar now, so even borrowing at zero or .5% doesn’t seem like that good a deal.

As Bloomberg pointed out, the Bank of Japan kept rates at zero for five years, and it did squat. So the Fed has announced that it will use non-standard measures like buying up government backed housing bonds, and is considering buying long term treasuries, whose rates simply aren’t dropping, even as people accept negative returns to buy short term securities. (They are doing so because the Fed was paying 1% interest on reserves, and treasuries can be used as reserves, which is why the Fed dropped the amount they pay on reserves to .25%.) […]

Deflation can always be fixed, in the worst case scenario, the government could just send everyone a gift card for $50,000 which expires in 3 months and tell them to use it or lose it. But it can’t be fixed by giving money to banks who won’t lend it to the real economy, and even pushing down long bond rates really isn’t going to matter as long as there are deflationary expectations.

So, expect the Fed to spend a LOT of money and get very little in return until someone uses some of the money to buy a clue. In the meantime, remember, you’re probably going to have to pay this money back, no matter how little it does, unless the government manages to make itself go bankrupt. In theory the US need never go bankrupt, but a lot more of this, and it may turn out to be the lesser evil.

Paul Krugman calls it the liquidity trap – the Federal Reserve can’t implement a rate change to facilitate lending at all, and the banks aren’t being forced to lend, and the quantity of money is meaningless because bonds are worth essentially just as much. The Fed is also planning quantitative easing, basically increasing the money supply. But when money is the same as bonds, what’s the difference? As Ian says, we’re exploding the deficit and getting little in return.

The other worry is deflation; consumer prices fell at a record rate last month, which means that retailers can’t sell enough to make a profit, which means they cut jobs, which means less people have money, and prices have to drop to sell anything, etc. Nasty business. While Kevin Drum notes that the drop in prices is entirely due to cheaper oil, taking that out of the equation there was virtually no change in inflation, which is unsustainable.

The textbook tells us to engage massive fiscal spending, as nobody is equipped to spend at all right now except for government. But Robert Reich is absolutely correct, IMO, that spending won’t be enough.

Keynesianism is based on two highly-questionable assumptions in today’s world. The first is that American consumers will eventually regain the purchasing power needed to keep the economy going full tilt. That seems doubtful. Median incomes dropped during the last recovery, adjusted for inflation, and even at the start weren’t much higher than they were in the 1970s. Consumers kept spending by borrowing against their homes. But that’s over. The second assumption seems even more doubtful: that, even if middle-class Americans had the money to continue the old pattern of spending, they could do so forever. Yet the social and environmental costs would soon overwhelm us. Even if climate change were not an imminent threat to the planet, the rest of the world will not allow American consumers to continue to use up a quarter of the planet’s natural resources and generate an even larger share of its toxic wastes and pollutants.

The current deep recession is a nightmare for people who have lost their jobs, homes, and savings; and it’s part of a continuing nightmare for the very poor. That’s why we have to do all we can to get the economy back on track. But many other Americans are discovering they can exist surprisingly well buying fewer of the things they never really needed to begin with. What we most lack, or are in danger of losing, are the things we use in common — clean air, clean water, public parks, good schools, and public transportation, as well as social safety nets to catch those of us who fall.

That’s why it’s not enough to spend, spend, spend, until the housing market comes back or everyone gets excited about the latest iGadget again. Indeed we need to create a new economy that is not based so heavily on unsustainable consumer spending. President-elect Obama has the right idea in talking about a green economy – not only would the money spent go into something of value, like the commons, but the emphasis on green technologies could spur innovation and perhaps generate something we can export for a change. Right now America is the number one exporter of raw materials in the world – we make precious little, give away our material wealth and do nothing but consume. When you strip away the CDOs and the CDSes and the subprime lenders, THAT’s the problem. We’re a bubble-based economy out of necessity. Without re-industrializing America, without making products the rest of the world wants, that will never change.

James Boyce has more, and believe me, I gave you the GOOD news.

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Scalps Deja Vu Vu

by digby

Let’s party like it’s 1999:

Senate Republicans have requested information about Attorney General nominee Eric Holder’s role in the Elian Gonzales controversy as part of a broad probe into his tenure with the Clinton administration and potential ties to presidential scandals during that era.
Eight of nine GOP members on the Senate Judiciary Committee wrote Clinton Presidential Library Director Terry Garner on Thursday to ask for 10 categories of material, and that includes any information on Holder’s involvement with the Cuban boy seized by U.S. agents in April 2000.
Holder was deputy attorney general at the time. While the senators have publicly stated concerns about Holder’s role in the 2001 pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich, the move to focus attention on the highly controversial Gonzales case indicates the confirmation of President-elect Obama’s top law enforcement official will be anything but smooth.
Seeking information about Gonzales suggests Republicans are seeking issues that will resonate outside the Beltway, unlike the Rich pardon.An aide to Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) says Republicans never showed the Clinton Library letter to Leahy but simply began referring to it in comments on the Senate floor on Thursday. The aide also said Republicans are being hypocritical by asking for a voluminous amount of information about an attorney general candidate.

Keep in mind that they are just doing this to generate enough heat that Obama will find it in his best interest to withdraw Holder’s nomination so that these hearings don’t turn the first days of his administration into a circus. They want a scalp. It proves their relevance, it is yet another shot at Clinton (which guarantees the media will eat it with a spoon) and it puts Obama on notice that they can still gin up a hissy fit at a moment’s notice if they feel they need to. The press is already showing they will move right along with them without missing a beat, so it’s a logical strategy.

Let’s hope he doesn’t give it to them. Once you start meeting their lunatic demands, there is no end to it.

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Press Throwdown

by digby

Earlier today on MSNBC, Tamron Hall played the tape of Obama refusing to answer questions about Blagojevich today, chatted a bit about that and then asked a question:

Tamron Hall: He talked about transparency. We’re seeing him in a tight situation with this Blagojevich thing. Are we seeing a different Barack Obama emerge?

Mark Murray, NBC news director deputy political director: We’re seeing a Barack Obama that’s actually trying to take control of the agenda. And that question was in reference to the Blagojevich scandal and Barack Obama said “I’ve already spoken about this. We’re going to release all of our contacts the week of December 22nd,” so for a reporter like me, obviously, that week will be big and if there isn’t any news coming from them then the Obama folks really do have a problem.

However it really isn’t a secret that Barack Obama really hasn’t had a fantastic relationship with the press corps that’s been following him over the last two years. There have been some testy moments. It’s not surprising that Obama would be annoyed by a substantive and relevant question like we heard this morning.

Tamron Hall: Mark Whittaker said this morning — the bureau chief for NBC — that he’s got to get used to answering these questions and maybe the press corps that’s been following is really going to have to start pushing his so that they’re not accused of what some were accused of when Bush was president of not asking the tough questions.

Mark Murray: No doubt about it Tamron, as we’ve seen in this press conference and in previous ones reporters were only allowed three questions. It came out of the pool reports today after that event that Barack Obama took more questions from students he was with rather than the reporters. So I think we’re going to see reporters roll up their sleeves a little bit but no doubt when Obama becomes president in the white house he’s going to get a LOT more questions than just three at media availabilities.

They’re mad as hell and they’re not going to take it anymore.

The interesting things about this is that NBC bureau chief Mark Whittaker is throwing down the gauntlet to Obama and saying that the press feels it has something to prove after being accused of being Bush lapdogs. And his minion Murray is dutifully carrying the boss’s water.

Eight years of relentless harassment and character assassination, during which time the village media felt that Clinton and then Gore were “getting away with too much” because none of the endless GOP generated scandals ever came to anything, and so they had to take him down. Then, in order to “prove” they weren’t just childish scandal mongers after destroying Al Gore, they went the other way and laid on their backs and let Bush walk all over them as he oversaw the destruction of the country. Now, in order to once again “prove” they aren’t lapdogs, they are going to pick up right where they left off eight years ago, asking endless questions about inconsequential nonsense and breathlessly speculating about what the inconsequential nonsense might mean until a whole lot of people think there must be something to it or these people wouldn’t be talking about it so much.

It’s a coincidence, I’m sure, that they only feel the need to make sure that politicians don’t “get away with” anything when the politician is a Democrat and they only need to prove they aren’t reflexively hostile when it’s a Republican. I’m also sure that ill-informed bloggers speculating as to whether or not that might actually be a reflection of the political values of the political establishment would be wrong, so I’ll refrain from doing it.

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