Month: April 2013

Some hope for repeal? Maybe? Yes, maybe …

by digby

I’ve been agitating to just repeal the sequester since the stupid thing took effect.  I’ve never been able to see why everyone treated it as if it was written in stone before the pain of the cuts even kicked in. I certainly never got why the Grand Bargain was the only alternative.

Anyway, my wan little wish may have a chance (emphasis on “may”.) Here’s Greg Sargent:

Top House progressives are demanding a sit down meeting with President Obama to underscore their opposition to any Social Security benefits cuts as part of a Grand Bargain — a sign that the left has no intention of allowing any cuts to go forward without a major fight.
[…]
Over 100 House Dems have already signed a letter opposing Chained CPI, and many of the signatories are likely to be on tomorrow’s letter. Meanwhile, Senators Sanders and Tom Harkin introduced a resolution today opposing Chained CPI, signaling strong opposition among liberals in both chambers.

All of this comes at an interesting moment. Suddenly, the idea of temporarily turning off the sequester altogether is being seriously talked about by top Democrats. It required the outcry over sequestration-caused flight delays to bring it about, however. With Republicans complaining about the flight delays — and attacking Obama as responsible for them, even as Republicans claim the sequester as a victory for themselves — Harry Reid is now calling the GOP’s bluff by suggesting we simply cancel the sequester temporarily, by counting war savings to reduce the deficit.

The White House endorsed it too, although they did evidently make it quite clear they still want their Grand Bargain eventually. But it’s hard to see how they get it when the pushback from Democrats makes it clear that they’ll make the Republicans stab their own base in the back to get it.

Sargent writes:

Liberals and unions have long been pushing for the simple cancellation of the sequester. And so progressives are hoping that by signaling anew that any Grand Bargain to replace it with entitlement benefits cuts will face extremely stiff headwinds from the left, it will make it that much more likely that Obama and Dem leaders will see suspending the sequester as a better outcome, and will push harder for it.

He says that the GOP will never go along with it, but I’m not sure of that. Politicians of both parties are hearing from their constituents and they know they’ll hear from them even more if they agree to a Grand Bargain. Repealing the sequester is the easy way to do a reboot on this whole mess. They can agree to some sort of “summit” to deal with the (already rapidly shrinking) deficit and Obama can appoint more commissions or whatever they need to do to save face. But the only way out of this that isn’t going to cause tremendous pain for everyone is to kill this hideous mistake and start over. It’s not out of the question that the basic political survival instinct of Washington politicians is finally kicking in.

We live in hope.

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Social progress can be undone by fiscal conservatism

by David Atkins

I’ve noted in the past the harm done by the new ecumenical neoliberalism that vainly attempts wash away the sins of fiscal conservatism in the cleansing salve of social liberalism. I’ve also noted that social liberalism should be the mere baseline for Democratic politicians, and that the true test of mettle for a progressive politician must be on economic issues.

All of this is true for its own sake, as well as for the future of liberalism. A political party that serves to protect and promote the othered, the destitute and the out groups of society will engender devastating backlashes if it fails to also protect and serve the economic interests of the broad, bourgeois middle class. Conservativism will always try to tell the middle class that their interests would be strengthened by pushing down on the downtrodden. Liberalism must protect the downtrodden while informing the middle class that its interests are best strengthened by taking power away from the wealthy advantage-takers who predate on the society by rent seeking. If liberalism fails to do the latter, it cannot hope to do the former.

Case in point? The austerity-driven uptick racial violence and rightwing sentiments in Greece. Just as in the German Weimar Republican, failure to address middle-class economic concerns leads inevitably to conservative social backlash against the oppressed.

Taking away the supports of labor, social services, pension programs like Social Security, and others while pretending to do well by minority groups does little good. Fiscal conservatism cannot help but do devastating harm to social liberalism in the long run as well. Any fiscal conservative pretending to be socially liberal is either deluding themselves, or deluding the voters.

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Red and blue state Senators come together to stop the Chained-CPI

by digby

I’ve got some good news for you. Some Democrats in the Senate are awake to the fact that voting for the Chained-CPI is a recipe for losing their jobs and making a mockery out of everything the Democratic Party has stood for for the last 60 years:

A resolution introduced in the U.S. Senate today expresses the sense that Congress should not use the Chained Consumer Price Index to calculate cost-of-living adjustments for Social Security or benefits to disabled veterans or their families. The resolution was introduced by Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) with the support of Senators Mark Begich (D-AK), Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Al Franken (D-MN), Kirsten Gilibrand (D-NY), Kay Hagan (D-NC), Mazie Hirono (D-HI), Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), Jeff Merkley (D – OR), Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), Jack Reed (D-RI), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Brian Schatz (D – HI), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI).

“There is nothing more unfair or inappropriate than cutting benefits for seniors and veterans who have become disabled as a result of their service to our country,” said Harkin. “Adequate annual Cost of Living Adjustments are critical for the millions of Americans who rely on these benefits to make ends meet. The truth is that the way we currently calculate COLAs is already inadequate to keep up with rising medical costs. The Chained CPI would take us even further in the wrong direction by directly cutting benefits for millions of Americans. This resolution expresses our steadfast opposition to doing so.”

There are more signing on every day. So it’s probably a good time to make a call to your Senators and if they’ve signed on, offer your thanks. If they haven’t, tell them you’d really, really appreciate it if they’d sign on too. (Even Republicans. I have no doubt that making this a bipartisan resolution would be very helpful.)

This is important. Boehner can’t pass this in the House with Republicans. In fact, he would need  Democrats to be in the majority. And if recent history is any guide, he absolutely needs for the Senate to pass this thing with a bipartisan majority before he can even bring it to the floor.

I didn’t know if we had a hope of stopping this in the Senate but from the looks of that list — not all liberals, by any means — we might be able to get it done. And that will probably kill this beast.

Update: looks like somebody hit a nerve:

WASHINGTON, April 24, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — “Reaching agreement on a comprehensive debt deal will require consideration of all options and compromises by both sides, and taking proposals off the table makes a deal harder. Chained CPI is a technical change that would help improve the budget situation and strengthen Social Security, and it has the support of President Obama as well as experts across the country. It is irresponsible and counterproductive to take a common sense and bipartisan option off the table.”

For more information about the Campaign to Fix the Debt, please visit www.fixthedebt.org.

Boo hoo.

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QOTD: nameless White House official

by digby

Via Politico:

“The president has made clear that he wants to work with both sides to see if we can find a caucus of common sense to find a solution to our deficit challenges,” the official told POLITICO.

About those deficit challenges:

John Makin, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, looks at the Congressional Budget Office’s projections and argues that “American fiscal austerity has been moderate and probably . . . has proceeded far enough for now.” A budget deficit that was more than 10 percent of GDP in 2009 is on track to be about half that this year. “The federal budget deficit is shrinking rapidly,” writes Jan Hatzius, the chief economist of Goldman Sachs, in an April 10 report. Goldman estimates that in the first three months of 2013 the deficit was running at 4.5 percent of GDP, and they forecast a deficit of 3 percent of GDP or less in the 2015 fiscal year. Hatzius adds that “there is still a great deal of room for the economic recovery to reduce the deficit for cyclical reasons.”

Great! Maybe we can have a bit of a breather. We’ve had years of hardship and it would be really great if at the very least, the government could stop with the counter-productive blood-letting and let the economy and our society heal.

Oh crap:

Makin sums it up this way: “Moving forward, it is important for the US Congress to take yes for an answer to the question of whether it has already achieved substantial deficit reduction. Perhaps by accident, Congress has in fact reduced the US budget deficit by enough to enable working at long-term fiscal reform, including the aforementioned reform of the tax and entitlement systems over the next year.”

This fight will never end. We killed the confidence fairy and bond vigilantes turned out to be phantoms. The “90% Debt to GDP” vampires are jokes. Has it changed the elite’s desire to cut the meager social insurance programs and enact bogus “tax reform”? Nope. They simply refuse to cry uncle.

If I thought it was possible in any way that by “reform” they meant to make life easier for the old, the sick and the disabled (or even just didn’t make things worse)it might make sense to let down our guard. But we know from the president’s Grand Bargain budget that he means to cut Social Security, Medicare and medicaid (aka destroying the programs in order to save them) and his opening bid on corporate tax reform is “revenue neutral.”

So, we’re not out of the woods. Now that austerity has been discredited, they’ve decided it’s good news because it means we can focus on cutting government.

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The spectre of “welfare jihadists” have the right wing in a simultaneous orgasm. It’s not pretty.

by digby

Fergawdsakes:

Fueled by a report from the conservative Boston Herald, right wing media outlets such as Fox News, the New York Post, and the Washington Times, are demonizing government assistance programs by tying them to the heinous terror attacks committed at the Boston Marathon. Conservative blogs used sensationalized headlines and rhetoric to make their attacks, like RedState’s “Does The US Welfare System Benefit Jihadists?” and Monica Crowley’s “Nice Return on Our Investment, Huh?”

On April 24, 2013, the Boston Herald published a report that claimed, “Marathon bombings mastermind Tamerlan Tsarnaev was living on taxpayer-funded state welfare benefits even as he was delving deep into the world of radical anti-American Islamism.”

In addition to the Drudge Report, RedState, and Monica Crowley, the story was also picked up by Fox Nation, Breitbart.com, The Daily Caller, the New York Post, the Washington Times, and others.

Like Limbaugh:

LIMBAUGH: Now we hear that the entire Tsarnaev family was on welfare. How could he not be an Obama supporter?

[…]

So we have another great example of your tax dollars at work. Your tax money helped to pay for the explosives, as well as Tamerlan’s at least two trips back to Dagestan, his late model Mercedes, his $900 shoes. No wonder this guy hated America.

If liberals were as shameless as wingnuts, they’d be screaming about how the right wing is “politicizing” the attack for their own aims. Which they are.

It’s hard to understand what they think the meaning of this is. They are reporting it as a state program (obviously, since federal “welfare” has been drastically cut back.) Do they think that being on government assistance caused this guy to become a jihadist so we should get rid of all welfare programs because they make people terrorists? (At least that’s original — usually they are obsessing about “dependency.”) Or would they just they just like to prohibit all Muslims from collecting government benefits just in case they might be extremist or nuts with a grievance?

It’s hard to know exactly what they’ve extrapolated from this random fact and none of it makes much sense. So I think it’s safe to assume that it’s just their usual lizard brain bigotry has been activated and it’s making them scream incoherently. And as usual, all their pleasure receptors are going crazy as well — the orgasmic feeling of a wingnut being able to link “welfare” and “terrorism” is vividly on display. I’m buying brain bleach futures as we speak.

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Austerian laughing stocks

by digby

Pass this around to everyone you know. They’ll enjoy it and they’ll learn something very important:

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Indecision Political Humor,Video Archive

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Indecision Political Humor,Video Archive

I wish I was as sure that this idea is now a laughing matter as Weisenthal is. It’s hard for me to imagine Ruth Marcus and David Brooks ever finding the idea of human sacrifice amusing. They just “know in their bones” that the social safety net is unnecessary. After all, they don’t know a single person who really needs it.

And unfortunately, our political leaders don’t seem to have gotten the memo either:

President Barack Obama is reaching out to Republican senators — the most receptive participants from his recent “charm-offensive” dinners — to jump-start talks to reach a “grand bargain” on entitlements, spending and taxes, according to White House and Congressional officials.Obama — fighting against steep odds to reach a big legacy deal on deficits and debts — has personally pressed Congressional leaders for another shot at reaching an agreement similar to one that fell apart during negotiations with Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) in 2011.Republicans Obama considers to be committed to another round of negotiations in good faith.

But a senior White House official told POLITICO any speculation about specific participants would be “wrong,” and refused to confirm any names because none of the potential attendees had yet been contacted or even briefed on the new process.

The official did say the group of probably no more than eight would be largely “self-selecting” — GOP senators who had previously expressed interest in a budget working group.Obama’s team has kept Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) in the loop, according to leadership sources, but so far the effort has been spearheaded by the West Wing.

I’m going to guess the White House feels more strongly about this than ever: the second term domestic agenda is in trouble what with sensible gun safety being sabotage by the NRA and the immigration bill in danger from the right wing terrorism pants-wetters. This may be all that’s left.

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Why the job creators hate progressive programs

by digby

The CEPR reports:

A series of earlier CEPR reports documented a substantial decline over the last three decades in the share of “good jobs” in the U.S. economy. This fall-off in job quality took place despite a large increase in the educational attainment and age of the workforce, as well as the productivity of the average U.S. worker. 

This report evaluates the likely impact of several policies that seek to address job quality, including universal health insurance, a universal retirement system (over and above Social Security), a large increase in college attainment, a large increase in unionization, and gender pay equity.

Guess what? Well,  it turns out that jobs in general have been getting worse over the past few decades, (although women have improved their lot while men have not, for obvious reasons.) The report does some modeling on what might make things better and I’m sure you won’t be surprised to see what might help:

And not having these things?

It would appear that a whole lot government initiatives and progressive priorities would result in better jobs.

I’m going to guess we know why the “job creators” are so against it, don’t we? This is the sort of thing that makes workers feel empowered. And we can’t have that. The more desperate they are, the better.

Concerned citizens, start your engines

by digby

This is just the beginning of activity planned to protest the proposed Grand Bargain cuts. Let’s hope it’s not the last. This one’s sponsored by Move-On:

Stop Social Security cuts petition delivery

On Thursday, April 25, as part of our “emergency mobilization to protect Social Security,” we’re delivering hundreds of individual petitions that MoveOn members created to protect Social Security. We’ll show up at congressional offices at noon local time, deliver petitions and send a strong message: “We won’t support Social Security cuts or any politician who votes for them.”

Click here for more information about how to find an action in your area. I put in mine and found half a dozen of them so they’re definitely happening. If there isn’t one, you can put it together yourself.

This is happening tomorrow and I know that many of you work and won’t be able to attend. But if you’re a student and can get away, you should do it. These cuts will hit you hard in any number of ways and believe me it may not sound like much at the moment, but when you get older you’ll regret not fighting harder to keep this program strong. Also too, your parents and grandparents.

If you’re retired, obviously you should do this. It will affect you, regardless of what they say. The Chained-CPI will be scheduled to kick in right away. It may not make much of a difference in your checks in the near term, but before long you’ll notice it. (And unlike the kids, you are very attuned to how fast time flies, amirite?)

Any of the rest of you who can get away to do this, please do it. I know it seems like a long shot that they’ll get away with it, but it’s extremely important to exert pressure right now and keep it up as long as this hideous offer from the president remains out there.

Keep in mind that everyone says the gun bill died at least partially because of the intensity gap — the gun nuts just mustered more energy to defeat it. It matters.

Click here to find your local Move-On action.

Oh, and do this too, if you can.

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A progressive shame


by digby

Here’s a fine example of the kind of elevated advertising our allegedly feminist LA Mayor candidate Wendy Greuel is sending out against her rival Eric Garcetti:

It’s not often you see an allegedly progressive woman evoke the old Madonna-whore archetypes to sell herself as a “good woman.” (The highlighting of the word “lip service” is especially clever.) That this flyer is paid for by California Women’s Vote — aka Emily’s List — makes it all the more astonishing.

If I lived in LA, I’d vote for Garcetti. I’d dearly love to see more women in office, but it won’t help us much if they perpetuate this sort of garbage.

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What is this “conference” you speak of?

by digby

You have to hand it to them, they know that the American people know nothing of conference bills and “regular order.”  They figure they can ride this out with no problem:

House Republicans spent most of their time over the last three years reminding Americans that Senate Democrats hadn’t passed a budget in two, then three, then four years. It was a regular Republican talking point, a particular favorite of House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s. But now that the Senate has returned to regular order by passing a budget, House Republicans are refusing to come to the table to negotiate a long-term spending plan.

Republicans passed their own budget, the plan Ryan authored, in March, and since the proposal differs from the Senate budget, regular order requires the two chambers to come together in conference to iron out their differences in a compromise budget that is then taken back to the full memberships of each house. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has hinted at forming such a conference for more than a week, but Republicans have shown no willingness to join him. This morning, Senate Republicans blocked Reid from creating a conference committee, a move that led Reid to accuse them of turning “a complete 180″

Reid trash talked the GOP leadership as being the Tea Party’s love slaves, but the truth is that the Democrats’ plan to pass a Senate bill and then go to conference and emerge with the president’s pre-digested compromise was always a bit too clever by half. But in the end, they may just wind up with their greatest wish fulfilled: having the beltway elites declare them the only grown-ups in the room. Whether the American people give a damn about that remains to be seen. I’m going to guess they aren’t quite as interested in the winners and losers in games concerning arcane congressional procedure as the Washington Post editorial board, but you never know.

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