Month: February 2013

“Repeal the Sequester” gains steam. Labor’s on board.

by digby

Greg Sargent reports that the “repeal the sequester” movement is gaining some steam on the left. Finally:

With Washington mired deep in the manufactured crisis known as sequestration, one option for resolving the crisis is getting almost no attention: Simply repealing the sequester.

That may now change. The AFL-CIO is coming out today for a repeal of the sequester. The labor federation will press the case in the days ahead that the sequester perpetuates destructive government-by-crisis, and that more austerity — replacing the sequester with other spending cuts — is exactly what the country doesn’t need at a time of mass unemployment and lackluster growth.

“We need to repeal the sequester,” Damon Silvers, the policy director of the AFL-CIO, told me in an interview this morning. “It’s bad economic policy, and it feeds a dynamic that encourages hostage taking. We are calling on elected officials not to play this game of substituting one bad thing for another bad thing. We’re insisting that our elected officials not buy into this inside Washington game of manufactured crises.”

Read the whole post. The interview with Silvers is a breath of fresh air and Greg’s conclusions are solid. The left, whatever it is, is a little bit slow on the uptake here, but it’s finally come to understand that if they don’t take a position against these cuts, the Obama administration’s “offer” to cut vital programs and otherwise degrade the Democratic party’s slim hold on its principles will be the leftward pole of any negotiation. Hopefully, with labor on board the Dems in congress will feel they have the backing they need to stand up to the centrists if, for some reason, the Republicans come to their senses and realize the administration is not only offering up even more in cuts, but they’re offering to politically cut their throats in the bargain. It’s not a good idea to just assume they’ll stay as dumb as they have been.

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Smelling salts alert! Keith Ellison was very, very rude to that nice man Sean Hannity

by digby

Oh my goodness, someone needs a fainting couch stat:

Democratic Rep. Keith Ellison attacked Fox News host Sean Hannity on-air tonight in what is surely one of the most explosive and contentious interviews between an anchor and a politician in recent history.

Rep. Ellison began the interview by calling Hannity “the worst excuse for a journalist I’ve ever seen.” He went on to accuse Hannity of violating “every journalistic ethic I have ever heard of” and called him “a shill for the Republican Party.”

Hannity calmly endured the attacks from the Minnesota congressman and tried in vain to assure him that he was not a registered Republican, but rather a registered conservative. He finally gave up and told Rep. Ellison to “keep ranting.”

The congressman’s remarks came after Hannity aired footage of President Obama giving two similar interviews about the looming effects of sequestration, set against a soundtrack of “O Fortuna,” from the Carmina Burana. Hannity said the President was “more concerned with fearmongering than finding a solution to the problem he created.”

(WATCH: Team Obama drives home sequester messaging)

Rep. Ellison cited the background music as evidence of Hannity’s “yellow journalism.”

“For you to say the President is to blame here is ridiculous,” the congressman said.

Roughly three minutes later, Hannity tried to ask questions and was consistently interrupted by Rep. Ellison. Finally, more than six minutes after the interview started, Hannity ended the interview

Now watch the video from the beginning and ask yourself if Ellison was the screeching lunatic described above.  Once you’re done laughing at the stupendously ridiculous notion that Hannity isn’t a Republican, ask yourself why the Politico is so upset about the bad manners of someone who actually challenges the lies of the right wing.

Here’s a highlight reel if you can’t bear to click over to Fox:

Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.comI do take issue with Ellison for one thing: calling Hannity a journalist.  He’s a propagandist.

I do wonder, however, why Politico doesn’t know that. It’s not as if he isn’t on TV telling lies and slandering his enemies every night. His guests often get perturbed. Indeed, rather than this being “one of the most explosive and contentious interviews in history” this sort of reaction is commonplace on Hannity’s show. (And apparently, poor Mother Byers has never even heard of Bill O’Reilly.) You can look it up. Here’s one example:

By the way, our good man Sean can get a little hot under the collar himself at times.

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Cardinal Mahoney is still feeling very sorry for himself

by David Atkins

Cardinal Mahoney, member of one of the most judgmental institutions on the planet, continues the pity party on his blog:

I can’t recall a time such as now when people tend to be so judgmental and even self-righteous, so quick to accuse, judge and condemn. And often with scant real facts and information. Because of news broadcasts now 24/7 there is little or no fact checking; no in-depth analysis; no context or history given. Rather, everything gets reported as “news” regardless of the basis for the item being reported–and passed on by countless other news outlets.

We have ended up with a climate in which it’s the norm to instantly pass judgement on one another, taking in and repeating gossip, sharing someone else’s judgment as the truth, no regard for other people who may be harmed. Whatever happened to the norm of giving others the benefit of a doubt until hard evidence proves otherwise?

Witness the hatred which has boiled up across the Middle East and other conflicted parts of the world, and the deep emotions which do not allow for understanding or love to emerge at all.

But Jesus calls us to something far different and much more difficult: we are to love our enemies, pray for those who persecute us. In today’s world, to follow Jesus and his Gospel message means to “be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.” That’s a really high bar for all of us, and certainly for me.

My daily prayer list includes both loved ones/friends, as well as those who dislike or even hate me. One prayer group involves those suffering from cancer and other illnesses, those who have been sexually abused by clergy and others in our Church, those who can’t find a decent job, those in danger of losing their homes, our immigrants who live in the shadows of society.

But another prayer group includes individuals who cannot forgive me for my past hurts or offenses, those in the media who constantly malign me and my motives, attorneys who never focus on context or history in their legal matters, groups which picket me or otherwise object to me, and all those who despise me or even hate me.

If I don’t pray for all of these people, then I am not following Jesus’ specific discipleship demand.

The narcissistic hubris of Mahoney, a man who deliberately misled police to cover for pedophile priests, in praying for those who can’t quite forgive him for his actions is amazing.

But it’s not altogether different from the unapologetic austerity peddlers who have wrecked Europe’s economy while wining and dining at Davos and tut-tutting over those nasty, angry populists in Italy. Or the media elite in Washington who wag their finger at the American public for not wholly embracing cuts to Social Security even as 1% of the nation controls almost 50% of the wealth.

Elites at nearly every stratum of society have lost touch with reality and failed. Their response to that failure has not been to apologize and recalibrate, but rather to double down and wallow in judgmental petulance.

Cardinal Mahoney is merely a symptom of a much larger disease.

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“We have to buy our own president”

by digby

Howie wrote a great post yesterday about the last gilded age and the robber barons choosing their own president. It features this fascinating video from the History Channel’s series “The Men Who Built America.”  Howie wrote:

Let me introduce the essential video [below] with a tweet from Sen. Bernie Sanders yesterday: “93% of all new income generated between 2009 & 2010 went to the top 1% while the bottom 99% split the remaining 7%.

One of the most memorable moments in the History Channel’s rabidly pro-capitalist series, The Men Who Built America, came when predatory titans John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie decided to make Republican Party hack William McKinley president and destroy the political career of populist Democrat William Jennings Bryan (“the Great Commoner,” his day’s version of Bernie Sanders). J.P. Morgan: “We have to buy our own president.” Watch the video above; you’ll love it. It sums up the real history of the post-Lincoln/pre-Tea Party Republican Party.

Plus ça change and all that jazz.

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No, Beppe Grillo isn’t a cheap Italian restaurant chain

by digby

There’s a lot being written about the Italian election results yesterday, but the most interesting has to be the profiles of comic Beppe Grillo, whose party surprised everyone by taking 25% of the vote:

Once effectively banished from TV after sending up politicians, he has created a brand of politics all of his own, one that has propelled Five Star to third place in both houses of parliament.

Dissatisfaction with the traditional political class, both right and left, drives a party which has made the internet its medium of choice, and has sought out relative unknowns for its candidates.

At 64, the bushy-haired comic leading this new third force can still work a crowd in a piazza and inspires a wide following on social media, tickling the Italian funny bone with his jokes. He called former Prime Minister Mario Monti, for example, “Rigor Montis” for his deadly serious manner.

However, his ability to engage ultimately in the business of government in one of the eurozone’s biggest economies is less clear.

Yeah, no kidding. But the election as a whole is a fascinating story and one that holds rather substantial ramifications for Europe according to Paul Krugman:

[T]he Italian election signals that the eurocrats, who never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity, are getting very close to the edge…

The fundamental fact is that a policy of austerity for all — incredibly harsh austerity in debtor nations, but some austerity in the European core too, and not a hint of expansionary policy anywhere — is a complete failure. None of the nations under Brussels/Berlin-imposed austerity has shown even a hint of economic recovery; unemployment is at society-destroying levels.

This failure came close to destroying the euro twice, in late 2011 and again last summer, as debtor nations threatened to enter a doom loop of plunging bond prices and failing banks. Each time Mario Draghi and the ECB stepped in to contain the damage, first by lending to the banks buying sovereign debt (LTRO) then by announcing a willingness to buy sovereign debt directly (OMT) ; but rather than taking the near-death experience as a warning, Europe’s austerians took the ECB-engineered calming of markets as a sign that austerity was working.

Well, the suffering voters of Europe just told them differently.

Krugman supposes that they were all so wrong because the VSPs assumed that the little people would just follow their cheerleading regardless of the conditions in their own lives.(I thought they’d been there and done that during the 1790s, but old habits die hard.) Krugman writes:

Wolfgang Münchau has a great lede in his column today, that gets at the essence:

There was a symbolic moment in the Italian elections when I knew that the game was up for Mario Monti, the defeated prime minister. It was when in the middle of the campaign – in the midst of an anti-establishment insurgence – he took off to Davos to be with his friends from international finance and politics. I know his visit to elite gathering in the Swiss mountains was not an issue in the campaign, but it signalled to me an almost comic lack of political realism.

What Europe’s VSPs fail to get is that the public perception of their right to lead depends on achieving at least some actual results. What they have actually delivered, however, is years of incredible pain accompanied by repeated promises that recovery is just around the corner — and then they wonder that many voters no longer trust their judgment, and turn to someone, anyone, who offers an alternative.

Let’s just say that Europe has a bad track record in that regard. As the Shrill One archly observes, “there may be worse figures than Beppe Grillo lurking in Europe’s future.”

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There is an alternative to the sequester for deficit hawks

by David Atkins

It hasn’t received much discussion in recent months, but it’s worth noting that the best plan for revitalizing our economy and eliminating our deficit is still out there. It was put together by the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and it’s called The People’s Budget. We’ve written about it here before, but let’s look at it again:

The People’s Budget eliminates the deficit in 10 years, puts Americans back to work and restores our economic competitiveness. The People’s Budget recognizes that in order to compete, our nation needs every American to be productive, and in order to be productive we need to raise our skills to meet modern needs.

Our Budget Eliminates the Deficit and Raises a $31 Billion Surplus In Ten Years
Our budget protects Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and responsibly eliminates the deficit by targeting its main drivers: the Bush Tax Cuts, the wars overseas, and the causes and effects of the recent recession.

Our Budget Puts America Back to Work & Restores America’s Competitiveness
• Trains teachers and restores schools; rebuilds roads and bridges and ensures that users help pay for them
• Invests in job creation, clean energy and broadband infrastructure, housing and R&D programs

Our Budget Creates a Fairer Tax System
• Ends the recently passed upper-income tax cuts and lets Bush-era tax cuts expire at the end of 2012
• Extends tax credits for the middle class, families, and students
• Creates new tax brackets that range from 45% starting at $1 million to 49% for $1 billion or more
• Implements a progressive estate tax
• Eliminates corporate welfare for oil, gas, and coal companies; closes loopholes for multinational corporations
• Enacts a financial crisis responsibility fee and a financial speculation tax on derivatives and foreign exchange

Our Budget Protects Health
• Enacts a health care public option and negotiates prescription payments with pharmaceutical companies
• Prevents any cuts to Medicare physician payments for a decade

Our Budget Safeguards Social Security for the Next 75 Years
• Eliminates the individual Social Security payroll cap to make sure upper income earners pay their fair share
• Increases benefits based on higher contributions on the employee side

Our Budget Brings Our Troops Home
• Responsibly ends our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to leave America more secure both home and abroad
• Cuts defense spending by reducing conventional forces, procurement, and costly R&D programs

Our Budget’s Bottom Line
• Deficit reduction of $5.6 trillion
• Spending cuts of $1.7 trillion
• Revenue increase of $3.9 trillion
• Public investment $1.7 trillion

It’s also worth remembering the balance of power in Washington. The White House is controlled by a Democrat who just won a resounding re-election victory and is regularly accused of being a radical socialist. The Senate is controlled by a healthy 10-vote Democratic margin. The American People just cast over four million more votes for House Democrats than House Republicans nationally–so though Republicans still hold the House, they do so on fairly illegitimate grounds due to gerrymandering.

The public polling shows the President with strong favorability ratings, even as public’s opinion of the Republican Party is cratering to at or near all-time lows.

The public wants increased spending on Social Security, opposes cuts to Medicare, supports an increase to the minimum wage, and despises the Tea Party and strongly supports higher taxes on the wealthy.

There is no reason, then, that the People’s Budget shouldn’t be the starting point for negotiations. There is no reason that the People’s Budget shouldn’t be discussed in major media outlets. And there is no reason that the Republican Party (and many Democrats) shouldn’t be forced to explain every day why they would rather force seniors to eat cat food than make the sensible moves demanded by the stated opinions and votes of the American People.

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Playing chicken with the defense hawks

by digby

I think Brian Beutler has this right:

The most important factor in this fight is probably the reality that Obama doesn’t have to face voters again and thus is willing to veto sequestration replacement bills if they’re composed of spending cuts alone. Congressional Democrats are fully aware of this, too, and that creates a powerful incentive for them to hold the line.

So sequestration will begin. Obama won’t cave. And then the tension sequestration was intended to create — and in fact has created — between defense hawks and the rest of the GOP will intensify and actually splinter the party. If that doesn’t happen quickly enough, then the sequestration fight will become tangled up in the need to renew funding for the federal government at the end of March. If Republicans don’t cave before then, they’ll precipitate a 1995-style government shutdown, public opinion will actually begin to control the outcome, and it’ll be game over.

So there are real dynamics at work here that can break the GOP’s resolve in this fight but that can’t easily be turned against Obama. Which means even though months of sequestration and a government shutdown followed by Obama folding outright is a theoretically possible outcome, there’s very little about the nature of the fight to make me think it’s likely to happen.

I’m not quite as sure as Beutler that the White House won’t fold in some way, but I certainly agree that the whole point is to divide the Republicans between the defense hawks and the debt fetishists. You can see the tension in the Senate already with Graham and McCain calling for revenue to avoid defense cuts. That’s where the action’s going to be. But I would also point out that the Democratic party has a share of defense hawks who can be counted upon to exert pressure for some kind of a deal as well. If it gets too uncomfortable I can see the White House throwing in the towel on their one demand for revenue and giving the GOP even more cuts to discretionary programs. (They could even throw in the Chained-CPI as a luscious slice of foie gras to the elite Villagers.)

Obviously, it doesn’t have to happen that way, but I think it pays for liberal groups to continue to assume it could. I’m hearing far too many members of the liberal cognoscenti saying that the “entitlement” cuts aren’t too bad and that “tax reform” can be done at a later date. Hopefully the White House isn’t listening to them.

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Villagers on hiatus, have no clue

by digby

Apparently Ron Fournier has no clue what the president has proposed as a replacement for the sequester:

Here are three paths to a deal:

Congress gives the administration flexibility on how to impose the $1.2 trillion in cuts. This would allow the White House to mitigate dangers and inconveniences. To the public, that might seem like a good thing. To Obama, it could be a trap: Accept the GOP’s compromise and lose his leverage, or be seen as the guy holding out for the worst-case scenario.

Republicans agree to a deal that includes new revenue from closing loopholes favoring the rich. This would be a victory for Obama, essentially ceding to his demands. The president could help Republicans save face (a critical element of any compromise) if he agreed to use some new revenue to reduce military cuts. A senior White House official who described this potential path said “it’s not exactly an accident” that Obama traveled to Virginia on Tuesday with Rep. Scott Rigell, a Virginia Republican who bills himself as a problem-solving lawmaker. Rigell’s district relies heavily on military spending.

Modest entitlement cuts could be mixed with loophole closures to produce a “win-win” package. Obama has already put “chained CPI” on the table for long-term debt reductions. He might prefer to wait to adjust the cost-of-living formula for Social Security, but taming the debt was always going to require more sacrifice from Americans than tinkering with one formula. In exchange for entitlement cuts, Republicans could swallow new revenue through closing loopholes on the rich—a concept they reluctantly accepted not too long ago.

To be sure, anything short of an absolute victory will anger liberal and conservative commentators, a prospect that Obama and Boehner hope to avoid. But risk is a part of leadership, and compromise is an ingredient to success.

Right. The win-win package he describes (and I do not agree that it’s “win-win”  — for the people anyway) is exactly what the president is proposing. But Fournier either doesn’t know that or can’t bring himself to acknowledge it. The White House should be thrilled, though. He makes it sound as if this is a compromise position instead of the president’s opening bid. Maybe the Republicans are dumb enough to believe that too — but I doubt it.

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Repeal this idiotic law

by digby

Certain members of the left, including yours truly, have been saying that we should simply repeal the sequester for many moons.Campaign for America’s Future initiated a petition calling for just that. Today, Keith Ellison of the Progressive Caucus wrote this:

If Congress cannot come up with a replacement to the sequester before the end of the week, we should eliminate the sequester entirely. One million working Americans should not be forced to pay the price for Republican stubbornness. If this goes into effect, it will be one of the most irresponsible legislative failures in the history of the Republic.

We would prefer to replace the sequester with a balanced approach to deficit reduction. The Progressive Caucus already introduced a bill called the Balancing Act that reflects what the American people voted for in November. It replaces the sequester with a fair approach to new revenue and necessary Pentagon budget cuts, and it creates jobs all over the country. It equalizes the budget cuts we’ve already made with revenue by closing tax loopholes for America’s wealthiest individuals and corporations. We shouldn’t sacrifice our economic recovery because Republicans are unwilling to vote for a penny in new contributions from their billionaire friends.

The sequester was a temporary face saving ploy that came out of the disastrous 2011 debt ceiling negotiations in which President Obama proposed massive spending cuts that have permanently moved the goal posts into the austerity zone. (And needless to say, the Republicans demanded even more. That’s how they roll.) So here we are.

The conventional wisdom has it that we are going to go through with the sequester because neither side is willing to slash entitlements to the bone — which everyone knows is the only responsible way to deal with a projected deficit that may or may not even be accurate. But more and more the VSPs are saying that the sequester isn’t really so bad so why not just go with it. Indeed, they are saying that nothing is more important than cutting — cutting anything, cutting everything, cut, cut,cut. At this point there is almost no discussion anywhere that doesn’t begin with that premise. Sure the president is asking for some vague (and obviously temporary) “loophole closing” which is laughable on every level, but as his press secretary said, “the president believes we have a spending problem” so I think we know where the emphasis is going to be.

Chuck Todd just announced on MSNBC that there is a growing consensus among the House GOP to allow the sequester to proceed but give the president more flexibility about what he’s going to cut. The idea is to blame him for the fallout. The president, on the other hand, feels confident that he can successfully blame the GOP. But one thing that I think they all agree upon is that defense contracting will not be seriously cut.

So, if this happens, it’s going to be a pain and blame fest. I’m guessing that the Republicans will get the worst of it since everyone knows they love cuts while the president is a closet socialist. But it’s going to be unpleasant for everyone. At some point I would guess they can come together and decide to cut those nasty entitlements and spare everyone any further inconvenience. After all, the “entitlement” cuts won’t be felt for a good long while. Most of the politicians can cash in long before anyone actually gets hurt. Win-win.

Update: GP at Americanblog has more.

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Village leaders complain that the president isn’t more enthusiastic about making people suffer

by digby

So, according to the Village media leaders at the Washington Post editorial board, the Republicans have been irresponsible in their budget negotiations but the real problem is that the President hasn’t been working hard enough to rally the country to the Republicans’ position:

The Republicans are right when they say that the sequester was Mr. Obama’s idea, in the summer of 2011, and that he agreed to a deal that was all spending cuts, no tax hikes. He is correct that he hoped the sequester would never go into effect but would be replaced by a 10-year bargain that would raise revenue and slow the growth of entitlement costs. He is correct, too, on the larger point: Such a deal is what’s needed, and the Republicans are wrong to resist further revenue hikes.

But if that’s what’s needed, why is Mr. Obama not leading the way to a solution? From the start, and increasingly in his second term, Mr. Obama has presented entitlement reform as something he would do grudgingly, as a favor to the opposition, when he should be explaining to the American people — and to his party — why it is an urgent national need.

They also say that it’s the congressional Democrats’ fault for saying they are against these “entitlement” cuts in the negotiations. Because everyone knows that the only thing that really matters is cutting the hell out them. That should be obvious to any Very Serious Person. And while the President has obviously offered many cuts to these entitlements and pledged his intentions since before he was elected, he hasn’t done it with the relish and enthusiasm that’s required to satisfy these ghouls. After all, if you can’t enjoy blaming the middle class and working people for all the nation’s ills — and then gleefully telling them must suffer for it when they get old and sick — you really aren’t much of a leader.

You know, I have no idea how much the editorial board of the Washington Post makes. But this fascinating article about media paychecks from 2005 still haunts me whenever I see something like this. At that time Bill Keller of the New York Times was taking home 650k a year. That was eight years ago. And perhaps the WaPo never paid that much and still doesn’t. But I’m going to guess that the people who wrote that editorial are doing vastly better than more than 90% of the nation and will never have to worry about whether they’ll have enough money for food and medicine.

Chris Hayes’ theory about social distance is more relevant than ever as we watch the entire establishment elite of this nation scream bloody murder at the idea their taxes might rise a very tiny bit even as they insist that it’s no problem to cut the already shamefully meager monthly stipend for the elderly because they can buy cheaper food. That’s basically what they want the president to enthusiastically go forth and sell to the people. Shocking that he’s not excited about doing that, although I have to say they aren’t giving him enough credit for doing the very best he can.

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