You're Being Put On Warning: There Will Be No Retirement For You or Three Reasons Our New Work Ethic Makes No Sense

I really shouldn't watch the mainstream media. It just aggravates me.

The morning on NBC's The Today Show, they had a seemingly heartwarming story about a 101-year old woman, Sally Gordon, who is still working as the Assistant Sergeant at Arms of the Nebraska State Legislature. She still walks to work. Good for her, but listening to Nebraska U.S. Senator and republiDem Ben Nelson touting that we should all take a lesson from this woman, my heart wasn't warmed.

It seemed less of a celebration to me than a warning. We'll all be expected to work until our own bitter ends because there will be no Social Security. The republiDem in chief, President Barack Obama is expected to call for Social Security cuts in his state of the union address and he's already put the first nail in its coffin through his FICA tax cut-a-palooza during the lame duck session.

While a happy and working elderly population may seem like an ideal to some, the reality of it will be far less than ideal. First, not everybody is as healthy as is Ms. Gordon. Most people are not. As their standard of living goes down due to the downward spiraling tax and spending cut economy, it is likely that people will be less healthy.

Second, employers don't want older workers. For a while the style was to bribe them out with retirement bonuses and promises not to kill their pensions (and then go bankrupt and kill their pensions). Then, many companies found they didn't have to spend to get rid of their older workers. They just meaned them out with long overtime policies, changes in the way things were done and efforts to isolate them through ridicule. I don't know how many times I've seen managers tell the younger workers that an older worker was to be shunned for doing things the old way (often the more honest  and correct way).

While there are state and federal laws that are supposed to protect older workers, they are not that well enforced and require exhaustion of administrative remedies before one can sue in court. Before prosecuting a federal case, the worker must first try his or her luck with the EEOC. EEOC enforcement is only as good as the Administration for which it works. W. Bush didn't care about employment discrimination, so there wasn't much enforcement when he was president. Further, some argue that the laws chill hiring of seniors for fear of difficulty in firing them.

Third, in a limited job market, what happens to the younger workers when the older workers stay in their jobs? Unemployment among young workers has skyrocketed and we've already decided to chuck real stimulus for tax cuts and offshoring of jobs, so the job market isn't going to expand any time soon. We're doing little to help young people go to ever more expensive college too, so I don't know what we expect them to do.

So, if you saw the story about Sally Gordon and thought to yourself, "how nice", think again. It won't be so very nice for old and young when we decide working until you're dead is the American work ethic.

I've Engaged Senator Durbin's Office

Since the tax giveaway to the wealthiest of multinational corporations, I've been corresponding with Dick Durbin's office.

To his credit, at least Durbin's office actually receives my comment before they respond. In contrast, Kirk's office sends out emails asking for input. But if you observe how the technology works, you'll see that your input is never sent back. There's no click through and no 'thanks, we received your response' message returned. Your response disappears and a pre-written response is spit back to you.

In any event, I'm still sparring with Durbin's office, complaining about his support for the tax giveaway, and cut to Social Security FICA, and they're still responding. Below is their latest installment. I am always suspicious of a response that includes first and last name in the salutation and refers to my story that I never told, and they deleted my Beth hmmmmmmmmm.

Dear Ms. Ellen Gill:

Thank you for your message regarding the extension of unemployment benefits. I appreciate hearing from you and share your support for this important federal program.

In the face of the deepest economic downturn since the Great Depression and an unemployment rate hovering near 10 percent, Congress has tried to provide a much-needed safety net for people who have lost their jobs. In July, Congress extended emergency unemployment benefits for those who exhaust the 26 weeks typically provided by state governments. The program, however, was only extended temporarily, with funding expiring on December 1.

Fortunately, Congress recently overcame the objections of the Senate Minority to extend unemployment insurance for an additional 13 months as part of the Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization and Job Creation Act. While I did not support several core tax provisions within this legislation, including an extension of the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, I voted in favor of it in order to prevent 135,000 Illinoisans from losing their unemployment compensation before the holidays.

The bill that Congress approved will reauthorize the Emergency Unemployment Compensation (EUC) program and will temporarily extend 100 percent federal financing of the Extended Benefit (EB) program. Between these two programs, unemployed workers will be eligible for up to 99 weeks of total unemployment compensation.

While this reauthorization is vital to millions of Americans, there are still a growing number of individuals who are exhausting the maximum 99 weeks of benefits available to them and are advocating for the addition of a new level of benefits. To address this growing problem, I cosponsored the Americans Want to Work Act (S. 3706). S. 3706 would create a 5th tier of unemployment insurance, providing an additional 20 weeks of benefits for the long term unemployed in states with a jobless rate of 7.5 percent or higher. The bill would also increase tax incentives for businesses that hire those who are eligible for the new 5th tier or have exhausted all rights to unemployment benefits.

Unfortunately, the federal budget deficit and the continued opposition to EUC program is making it increasingly difficult to maintain the current level of compensation. Any further expansion of benefits, like those in S. 3706, faces an enormous uphill battle.

Providing unemployment insurance is not only a moral imperative, it is an important step towards stimulating the recovering economy. In these difficult times our priority in Congress must be to help Americans return to work, while ensuring that the unemployed receive assistance to make ends meet as they look for a new job. I will keep your story in mind as we continue to find ways to help all individuals in need.

Thank you again for contacting me. Please feel free to keep in touch.

Sincerely,

Richard J. Durbin

United States Senator

RJD/mk

Thanks for the response Senator Durbin, but I don't remember that same minority having the same problems when they were in the majority. The following table tells the story:

This wasn't a middle class tax cut. We just threw money at the already wealthy.

We're going to be stuck in a cycle of tax cuts, spending cuts to support them and spiral economic decline because what we really need is direct stimulus to create jobs. I think Senator Durbin know that. I think Kirk knows it too, but he never cared and never will.

Think Tank Update

Remember just before Christmas I wanted to start a think tank. It's my partial solution to the problem that the liberal point of view has disappeared from our national dialog.

The idea got a wonderful response on Facebook, so I'm going ahead with the project. We'll probably meet some time in January.

There have been several suggestions for content and priorities.

I was wondering if we should concentrate in the Illinois 10th District or move beyond. One suggestion was to scope the location at the regional level, a Great Lakes Think Tank. I like that idea because environmental and economic issues can be broken down regionally. For example, the Great Lakes states have deals about mercury release and the planned high speed rail projects are regional.

Some suggested we should affiliate with other groups. One person suggested we look into affiliating with Americans for Democratic Action. I like that this group talks about liberalism and social and economic justice. That might be an interesting possibility. Another person suggested affiliating with the group Political Wisdom Wiki which affiliates with the Coffee Party.

As for content, it has been suggested that we stick to economic issues. Carl suggested we focus on explaining economic news, what the corporate media focuses on and why vs. what we should focus on. That idea has merit because two of the biggest problems facing the country are lack of priorities and lack of understanding. For example, the commodity markets are perhaps the biggest issue facing the country, however, we rarely hear about them. When we do, they seem next to impossible to explain or understand.

I was thinking about the idea of a "people's think tank" and that got a favorable response on Facebook. The idea of the people's think tank would be that average Americans describe their own situations, jobs, how they're saving for kid's college and their own retirements etc. The difficulty, as I see it, would be to get enough participants to make the data, even if anecdotal, relevant.

I'm not sure I want to exclude social justice and peace topics. We have some wonderful peace and social justice advocates in our area and their input would be interesting.

Of course, one of my Facebook friends said he simply does not want to think. It's too painful.

If you have any ideas for a liberal think tank, comment, email me or visit me on Facebook.

Trading Social Security for Homeland Security

or

Homeland Security, My Precious

I watched the movie Precious last night. Precious is the movie version of the novel Push by Sapphire, and is the story of a 16-year old illiterate girl living in grinding poverty who was raped and impregnated by her father, and abused by her mother. The girl, ironically middle-named Precious, rejoins the greater society with the help of a welfare social worker and a teacher, only to be beaten back again by the consequences of the earlier abuse.

Sapphire wrote the book upon leaving a job as a remedial reading teacher in Harlem. Last year, when the movie first came out, Sapphire told NPR that she knew girls like Precious, "who didn't fit into the confines of our society's beauty paradigm, girls who were essentially "locked out" of the broader culture."

Precious, the movie and the lead character, got me thinking about how society is ordered. The whole idea throughout the ages has been about how best to control people.

Precious, the girl, for example, was "locked out of the broader culture", but she was controlled by her mother and father. They chose abuse as the means of doing so. Precious found greater society when her father disappeared, her mother's control began to break down. At the same time, she found the social safety net of teachers and social workers who attempted to replace her parents authority with school, a job, and eventual responsibility for her children. The latter was inarguably much better for Precious than the former, but of course, it's still control.

We're all under some sort of control. That's what society is all about, but the form it takes changes our circumstances and affects our personal fulfillment and happiness. Our ancestors didn't expect much happiness or any fulfillment. They were controlled first by lack of resources, difficulty of communication and travel, superstition, religion and those who claimed to be blessed with power over the mystical world. As people became literate and wealthier, communication and travel became easier, and leaders were caught abusing the older system, they grew more skeptical and demanded more for themselves. Monarchies and religious hierarchies broke down. Different means of societal control were needed.

Society replaced the old hierarchies with participatory means of government. These new governments created rules under which we are all supposed to live. When and where the rules have broken down, societies created more religious hierarchies, armies and dictatorships to control the masses, but many of those again broke down, similar to their predecessor monarchies, when the masses stabilized and re-gained knowledge and wealth.

In recent decades in our country, we've had a social contract among the people, employers, providers of goods and services and government. We go to work, and our employers are required to pay us, keep us reasonably safe, provide medical care and retirement funding. We can borrow money to buy a house, and both parties, the borrower and lender are supposed to follow a set of rules. We can buy and sell products, and both buyers and sellers are supposed to follow a set of rules so buyers get what they pay for and sellers get paid. Government has been the designated umpire, providing the means of enforcement of the rules and institutionalizing trust needed to keep the system operational. Government also created a safety net for people who fall out of the system. For Precious and her mother, it was Welfare*. For the poor disabled and elderly, it's now more limited Welfare, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

Now, the rules of our social contract are breaking down. Wealth is being moved back to a small group of people. The wealthy are using their windfall to buy greater power. Concentration of power and wealth is starting to reign in communications as the corporate media censors diverse political dialog and the Internet loses its neutrality. Greater security and fuel costs are making travel more difficult. Some are calling that freedom, pointing to the control aspects of the social contract, but does the elimination of the social contract bring freedom when the alternative involves harsher control in the form of censorship and limits on action and movement, and the consequences are increased poverty, ignorance, disease and disability?

The consequences of shifting away from the social contract are great. Increased power allows the wealthy to break the rules with impunity. Products and workplaces become unsafe, jobs and benefits are lost, and cartels manipulate prices upward even as wages and demand decline. We're even being talked into giving up our social safety net. Welfare is already pretty much gone. Medicare and Social Security are on the chopping block so we can better afford to move more money to the top of society. More people are moved into poverty and have no place to turn for housing, health care and even food. People are pitted against each other scrounging for resources and all that can lead to unrest unless people are controlled in different ways.

Changing the social contract by eliminating the part that keeps people stable and inside of society requires that we replace it with something to maintain control. It looks like we're going to replace the social contract with religion, fear and security. Religion has regained its position in society over the past few years, but the transformation is slow. Our greater society is still too educated sophisticated to surrender to it as in centuries before. Armies and dictators may come one day, but the vestiges of our participatory government remain and need to be completely broken down. That's where fear and security come in. Fear and security reduce the trust that enabled the social contract and safety net and may be the end of our rights and current form of government.

Since the destruction of 9/11/01, we've come to accept, and some even welcome, the new security. Homeland Security. Under the guise of Homeland Security, securing the Homeland, the Fatherland, we allow increasingly intrusive unwarranted searches of our possessions and our persons. They started in airports and government buildings, but are moving into other public places. As part of the plan, we listen to constant warnings piped into public places. In these warnings, we're reminded of nonspecific dangers and told to participate in Homeland Security by looking out for suspicious behavior and reporting it to authorities. We're controlled by fear and then recast as enforcers.

We're Precious, the illiterate girl controlled through violence and isolation, brought education and resources only to have it all taken away again. However, Precious was left with much of what she was given by her teachers and it was up to her to use it to her best ability because she still had rights and there were still institutions to enforce them. Our rights and institutions are being whittled away by more fear and more security. Homeland Security is poised to become the means of control that will replace our social contract and the social safety net.

Precious gets 3.5 cat treats for terrific performances, particularly that of Mo'Nique who played Precious' abusive mother. Homeland Security, on the other hand, is junk earning less than zero cat treats. We should chuck it, but I'm pretty sure we won't.

Watch the trailer for Precious and note how easy it is to control someone by telling them that education doesn't matter and they have nothing to offer and ruling them through fear:

Merry Christmas Eve

How About A Think Tank for Christmas

The country has gone Annie, Jr.

Annie Jr. is the sanitized version of the Broadway musical Annie most performed around the country these days. It's sanitized of the centerpiece of the original, liberalism.

The original musical Annie is replete with liberalism from its thank you note to Herbert Hoover sung by the residents of the shantytown to its once-famous finale New Deal for Christmas featuring an FDR character and celebrating the huge jobs and spending bill to help Annie, her orphan friends and the jobless in the country. Even republican character Daddy Warbucks gets with the program celebrating the new economic policy in the end. I'm not saying Annie is a real good description of liberalism (or even a very good musical), but it is an example of a piece of popular art that acknowledges the Depression and FDR's efforts to stimulate the economy using liberal demand-side economics. It's also an example of one that was specifically and intentionally killed in editing.

Annie Jr. was created by a company called Musical Theater International. The original purpose of MTI's junior musical program was to take out the smoking, drinking and sex from theater pieces so they could be performed in schools and by children's theater groups. Somehow liberalism became the "dirty" of which art must be sanitized for children. So, MTI created Annie Jr. without FDR, the shantytown thanking Herbert Hoover or the New Deal for Christmas. They completely changed the finale which is extraordinarily unusual in musical theater. Now, most people do not identify the musical with the Depression or the New Deal, and it's become a bland story about a annoying and needlessly optimistic red headed girl and her dog who hit it rich through a stroke of luck and go home to their benefactor's inherited mansion to enjoy the fruits of their labor doing nothing, not even giving a thought to those starving in the shantytown because they don't exist as far as any of the characters are concerned.

There are a lot more examples of liberalism taken out of the discussion in schools and popular art while conservatism continues to be discussed and misrepresented as more positive than it is. Recently, I even saw Ayn Rand and Margaret Thatcher references in the CWs new 90210 on the heels of pictures of Mother Teresa. I invite you to share any examples you know about with me, but we haven't just sanitized and skewed the conversation in schools and in kid's television and art. It's happening all over.  First liberalism was berated, and then it was removed from the airwaves and cables.

The mainstream media began the process of Annie Jr-ing our national dialog during the Reagan years. The media promoted Reagan's demonizing of unions, taxation and spending, and even his racist notions about statistically non-existent Cadillac-driving African American welfare moms and T-bone steak-eating "Black Bucks".

After a decade of fighting in earnest against the conservative economics of debilitating tax and government cuts in the 1980s, Liberals decided to push back by relabeling themselves as "Progressives". The problem with this new progressivism, the Clinton style republoDemocrats,  was that it wasn't progressive much at all. It was an "if you can't lick them, join them" strategy that talked about deficits and welfare reform. It bought into the notion that liberalism was dead, and worked to control the bleeding of truly dead conservatism by taking advantage of bubble economies.

Once welfare was cut reformed by Clinton, Social Security and Medicare went on the chopping block. Wall Street was not only not reigned in, it was allowed to come up with all sorts of new schemes. Illegal is relative only to the amount of enforcement, and there was less and less enforcement of the old FDR, post-Depression financial rules, until there was none under George W. Bush. Government spending, not illegal financial and corporate activity, was the enemy, and poverty was a well-deserved punishment for not getting with the program rather than a national problem to be solved. A good part of the religious right pushes the latter notion. Demand-side economics disappeared from public discussion even as failed supply-side began nudging the blue collar middle class into poverty when those job suppliers decided to supply the jobs to India and China rather than American workers.

After not too long, the only economic issues we discussed, and discuss to this day, were and are, how much to cut taxes and how much government to cut. It didn't and still doesn't even matter if the tax and government cuts work because no one ever mentions that.

President Obama, his avid supporters, and the swan song Democratic Congress contributed to the marginalization and disappearance of Liberalism. Obama not only caved often, he caved early. During the health care reform debate, he actively took single payer out of the discussion, and berated anyone who wanted to talk about it. On other economic legislation, he caved so early that the liberal point of view was never mentioned. Obama's idea of stimulus became  tax cuts and credits, and he actually apologized for the small amount of spending in the bill. Recently, he had yet another apology summit with big business. Now, Governors around the country seek kudos over giving up important spending (high speed rail) that would help their states, and Obama says nothing to them.

Obama's supporters police the discussion with their new idea of incremental progress. The notion is that we give away a lot to get a little, and we get what we want a little at a time. The reality is that we give away a lot over the  long term to get a little over the short term, the giveaways overwhelm the gets, and our ideas are quickly marginalized and disappeared. Most recently, Obama agreed to a FICA cut. What they're not saying out loud is that a FICA cut de-funds the Social Security Trust Fund. Obama's deal is a long term cut to Social Security in exchange for a blip of a short term unemployment extension and a couple of crumbs of tax credits. He's operating within the conservative dialog and damaging Social Security over the long run. It will be easy to kill the 70-year old program once it's really damaged. Worse, the whole thing is not stimulus because people are going to have to stop spending to carefully save for their retirement like they don't even fully understand yet. There will be no social safety net at the end of the line.

Obama has also actively promoted the idea that bipartisanship means that liberal issues and ideas must be forgotten. The new No Labels group takes that notion to the next level, de-legitimizing liberalism by simply wiping it out of the discussion. It's Annie Jr. over and over again.

So, what should liberals do?  I sure don't have an easy answer, but for my part, I want to work on rebuilding the liberal conversation. I'm thinking about trying to turn this blog, or another site, into an issue driven think tank. I'm hoping that some of you will join me to brainstorm how how we can discuss liberal ideas and get the discussion going nationwide and in the media without falling into current patterns of apologizing and cutting expectations.

What do you think?

If you think liberalism works, or at least works better than throwing money at multinational corporations to take overseas or Wall Street financiers to start their next scheme, spend this Christmas week and New Years week thinking about what messages you want to get across and how to do it. Email me at tcdblog@aol.com.

The Laundered Truth: How Bipartisanship Became STFU to the Left and Corporate Conservatism

The worst part of the deal struck between Obama and his republican friends is its fundamental dishonesty.1

The problems facing the country were not discussed and only solutions from the right were given credence, no matter that they've failed us in the past. Progressives and liberals, including lauded economists, were ignored, placated with empty promises of incremental reform and calls for patience, or pressured into silence with the old threat that a 2012 Democratic primary will be bad for the party and the country.

Many on the right are feeling the warm glow of victory, but if they were honest, they'd see that their issues were ignored too. All those tea partiers against CEO bonuses and for rule of law, national sovereignty and fiscal responsibility were ignored.

Americans suffering from unemployment, foreclosure, high education costs, high retirement costs, high medical costs are left to wallow and told to blame themselves. Apparently, it's not centrist to point out that many in the financial industry committed crimes and other industries have chronic problems with product quality and safety. Americans who bought homes, or really anything, between 2002 and 2008 were just greedy or stupid. Good thing we still have anti-depressants. I hear they work if you believe without critical thinking, sort of like religion.

Our problems aren't unemployment, foreclosure, health care costs etc. It's all about the dialog and our perception of our situation.

Enter No Labels.

No Labels is a group working to make sure conservatism,  albeit stripped of the populism and the overt racism of the tea parties, is deemed the center, the voice of reason, rational and bipartisan.

No Labels claims to be bipartisan, but its leaders are anything but. The group was founded by a group of right leaning career politicians and pundits, corporate leaders and free traders. No Label's Mark McKinnon was a political strategist for both George W. Bush and John McCain. John Avlon was a speech writer for Rudy Giuliani. On the kinda sorta left is Kiki McLean a former aid to that flaming liberal, Joe Lieberman, and Holly Page from the Democratic right wing group DLC. Also involved is New York's Michael Bloomberg, and many see No Labels as a vehicle for his upcoming presidential run.

Looking at the No Labels website, One sees that the group's issues are purely economic and laundered of any progressive concerns, concepts or ideas.

In the No Labels energy and environment world there is no global warming, no oil company price manipulation, and fossil fuels are still a pretty good energy idea. Our real energy problems are taxes and other countries subsidizing their own citizens' oil use. The "scholars" at the AEI (famous for its work to protect big tobacco and cast doubt on global warming) told them so. Oh, they also asked someone over at the Brookings Institute. Brookings was historically deemed liberal, but now is realistically right leaning getting much of its funding from corporations, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and even the Cato Institute.

No Labels trade policy is globalization and free trade. There are no problems with farmers in Mexico losing everything to NAFTA and farmers in India losing everything to Monsanto owned seed. No American jobs have been lost by throwing our industry at China. Multinational corporations simply spread around their prosperity and there is no need to discuss the labor and environmental problems they spread with it.

The group touts the Catfood Commission and the Peterson-PEW Commission On Budget Reform. The Peterson in Peterson-PEW is none other than billionaire hedge funder Pete Peterson whose mission has become ending Social Security. There is no mention of the Center for American Progress, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, or the Campaign for America's Future as progressive think tanks do not exist in the No Labels world.

No Labels apparently has no issue with unending war, torture, censorship, government spying on Americans, unwarranted searches and seizures, growing prison populations and the failed war on drugs. Their site is all quiet on those non-issues. Joblessness and poverty do not exist. The real problem is political polarization and "the disappearing center". They want the tea parties to dampen down on the stark populism and racism, but progressives and liberals simply do not exist.

With all this, No Labels can easily be labeled and should be labeled, it's corporate conservatism. The No Labels part, the refusing to call it what it is, is the lie.

When No Labels becomes what we perceive to be the center of this country, we've lost all progressive and liberal thought. Our President won't discuss it and Congress has been brought into the fold. Progressives and liberals are being laundered out of the system. Also laundered out of the system are issues most of us consider pressing like the loss of our jobs, industry, civil liberties, political voice, and our nation's moral leadership in the world, but those pesky things just lead to unnecessary partisanship, don't they?

***********************************
1The entire package is based on several flawed policy notions including:

1. the tax cuts remain temporary;

2. payroll taxes have nothing to do with Social Security's long term viability;

3. there was valuable quid pro quo for the tax cut extension--a short unemployment extension for ;

4. tax cuts are stimulus and worse...that extending tax cuts already in existence is stimulus;

5. that the deficit matters when we're talking about American families, but it doesn't matter when we're talking about mega-millionaires and multi-national corporations.

Temporary tax cuts extended long enough are permanent. The more money taken away from the Social Security Trust fund, the less there is to pay benefits. While Social Security is not in the hole now, it will be. The 13 month extension of unemployment is a mere blip on the radar compared to the long term problems that will be caused by starving government programs that help the poor and middle class into oblivion. At best, the tax cuts might heat up Wall Street for a while, maybe even give the folks over there a new impetus for some new swindle, but that will not translate to jobs because it's not investment into anything that creates jobs. It's just investment in investment. The funniest part of the whole thing is that they're selling old tax cuts as new stimulus. No new money is going to be flowing into the system that wasn't already in it when it collapsed in 2008.

Obama's deal was also based on flawed political notions including that:

1. republicans will put the country before their dream of making sure Obama fails;

2. now given what they wanted on tax cuts, republicans will deal fairly on subsequent matters;

3. Obama is just doing all this to ensure a 2012 victory and then he'll become the President he claimed he would be during the 2008 campaign;

4. once START, DADT and the Dream Act are passed, all will be well.

Won't happen.

One Leader for America and it's not Mr. Fake Hope-y Change-y

Yesterday for about 6-8 1/2 hours (depending on whether you count breaks taken up by Mary Landrieu and Sherrod Brown), Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont spoke.

While Barack Obama and Bill Clinton worked their best to sell the American people the end of the middle class and the American dream so the wealthiest Americans can loot what's left of the empire; while many Congressional Democrats (sadly including our own Dick Durbin) play their charade of mildly disagreeing when we all know they'll fold in the end, while Congressional republicans salivated over their huge political win, and consider a policy that will result in the bankrupting of Social Security and it's ultimate demise a win, Independent Senator Bernie Sanders acted like a true leader and spoke truth not only to power, but truth to the American people.

I suspect that many people have absolutely  no idea that Sander's spoke or what he said. Chis Matthews went an entire hour on MSNBC without even mentioning that Sander's speech was happening at the same time. So, while this video is only a mere smidge of the 8 1/2 hour filibuster-like speech, please pass it around widely.

Rachel Maddow and Jan Schakowsky explain it here:


I want to know what's the matter with Bill Clinton, a couple of weeks ago I saw him in Chicago and he complained about republicans wanting to repeal math. This deal does just that.

Go Bernie Go

The most important thing you're going to hear for a decade is Bernie Sanders near-filibustering on the Senate floor now.

Does it Have to be Blood? Does it Have to be Human? Does it Have to be Mine?

In the tax cut/unemployment insurance extension debate, we're hearing a lot from Obama claiming he's saving the unemployed with the sacrifice of tax cuts for the wealthy. We're hearing a lot about how corporations employ people, so they must be fed like the plant in Little Shop of Horrors.

One thing we're not hearing much about is this dirty little open secret, that many corporations not only don't pay taxes, they get paid by U.S. taxpayers. From the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (the quote and footnotes are to their report which can be found here):

The United States has plethora of generous corporate tax breaks. As the Treasury Department has noted, the United States’ low effective tax rate reflects its “narrow corporate tax base,” which is the result of “accelerated depreciation allowances [and] special tax provisions for particular business sectors … as well as debt finance and tax planning.”[3]

These tax breaks lead to very low tax rates on certain types of investments — even negative rates in some cases. For example, a 2005 Congressional Budget Office study found that the effective marginal corporate rate — the rate paid on the last dollar of income earned and arguably the tax rate most relevant for investment decisions — on debt-financed investment in machinery was negative, estimated at -46 percent.[4] This means that the total value of the deductions that companies may claim for such investment is much larger than the tax they pay. (Put another way, it means that other taxpayers effectively subsidize the investment.) A recent Government Accountability Office study similarly found wide variation in effective tax rates across corporations.[5]

The Treasury Department estimates that various corporate tax breaks will cost the federal government more than $1.2 trillion over the next ten years (2008-2017), a period during which total corporate revenues are projected to equal $3.4 trillion.[7]

That's right, some corporations, and we're not talking about the little mom and pop corner businesses or your neighborhood accountant or lawyer, get a check sent to them, not for overpayment of taxes, but a full blown, no strings attached check from the U.S. Treasury.

Robert McIntyre of Citizens for Tax Justice. and T. D. Coo Nguyen  of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that from 2001-2003, 28 Fortune 500 corporations paid negative tax rates (got money back without paying anything in). Here's a partial list from that report: Pepco Holdings (-59.6 percent tax rate), Prudential Financial (-46.2 percent), ITT Industries (-22.3 percent), Boeing (-18.8 percent), Unisys (-16.0 percent), Fluor (-9.2 percent) and CSX (-7.5 percent), the company previously headed by current then Secretary of the Treasury John Snow. McIntyre and Nguyen point out that much of this was caused by the very same Bush tax cuts now under debate. The rest of the report goes into some detail about how these corporations manage to use our U.S. tax system as a jackpot lottery.

If this tax scheme was good for creating jobs, we should be swimming in jobs. We're not because throwing money at corporations is not good for creating jobs.We're just feeding a beast so it can be fed and later ask for more. The same people who want, no demand, more tax cuts for corporations so the U.S. Treasury can write multinational corporations more checks, and FICA cuts to weaken Social Security, denied seniors a cost of living increase in their Social Security just yesterday afternoon.

So, the American taxpayer should be asking the same questions Seymour asks the man-eating plant, Audrey II, "Does it have to be blood? Does it have to be human?" The seniors and the unemployed can also ask, "Does it have to be mine?"

The Importance of Abstaining from OFA, Candidates Who Don't Share Our Values or Don't Have the Courage to Act on Them

{UPDATED}

I've read on Kos that some diarists are recommending we unsubscribe from Organizing for America h/t Carl). I did that back during the health care reform debate.

Actually, they kicked me out, but then they didn't. They didn't unsubscribe me. When I unsubscribed myself, they didn't honor it. It had nothing to do with me, they just don't honor un-subscriptions. I say that because I unsubscribed again a few months ago and I still get the emails. I unsubscribed again a couple of days ago and I still get the emails. I think there's some sort of spam law against that, but for political things it may be unconstitutional (haven't done the analysis, but imagine some constitutional problem).

In any event, this made me think about the importance of un-subscribing vs. remaining in the fold etc. It occurred to me that one reason liberal ideas are ignored now is that we've continued to support candidates and officials who won't put up the fight for them. We buy the excuses about how hard it is to pass anything liberal or progressive. We're told they did the best they could and next time they'll do better, and we're afraid of the alternative. We reject the candidates and office holders who do share our values and act on them because we're afraid they cannot win or move forward in their careers (ie Dennis Kucinich). Then, the party gets its temporary fix of cash and votes and goes about its merry way promoting and enacting the republican and financial institution agenda, sometimes throwing in a crumb or two like Lilly Ledbetter or a tad bit of stimulus in a tax cut bill labeled stimulus. We take the crumbs and continue to support Democrats even though what we end up with is about the same as if the opposition won. It's become a cycle.

The problem with that cycle is that is has weakened liberalism. No one has to consider the liberal point of view because they know not only will no one fight for it in earnest, they won't even discuss it much. Our representatives know they must seriously consider every far right-wing proposal because those guys spew hatred at the first sign of debate. They get personal and they don' t stop until they've destroyed their opposition. That has won them a permanent seat at the table even their ideas are old, tired, based on false premises, intentional mischaracterizations and outright lies.

Contrary to what Democratic strategists have warned us about the dangers of setting litmus tests for our own progressive values, it hasn't hurt conservatives or the republican party one bit.Who thought Joe Walsh could win? No one, right? Bean was sufficiently demolight, republican-esque per the old logic, but for all his extremism, Joe Walsh beat Bean.

So, go ahead and unsubscribe to OFA over and over again even if you still get the emails. Then go out and refuse to support Democrats who refuse to get with the program. They've earned our inaction and perhaps action for other candidates and other parties. Maybe then, we'll get our ideas to the table and eventually get the change for which we voted in 2008, and maybe Obama will get the change he deserves, a nice job in the private sector.

Yesterday, Obama at the same time warned us against and berated us for going home. What he does not understand is that we aren't going home. He just hopes we will and come back in time to reelect him.

Republicans should not be too smug about all of this. Tax-cuts-for-the-wealthy loving Mark Kirk did not become the "deficit hawk" he promised just a few short weeks ago. He tried no more than Obama tried to help American workers, seniors, the disabled, children etc. However, I would not be surprised if many of Kirk's supporters were counting on him lying and the rest have absolutely no idea what any of this is about in the first place. Whether you're on the winning side or on the loosing side, lack of principles is not an attribute because even if you win, you don' t win anything worth having.

Guest Blog by Lee Goodman: Obama Bombs

by Lee Goodman

As the curtain comes up on the second half of his presidency, Barack Obama will find that many of his supporters, disappointed by his poor performance, left during the intermission. They will not be back.

Where will they go? Anywhere but the Democratic or Republican parties, both of which are seen as hopelessly controlled by corrupt individual and corporate interests. Many will sit out the next election, and perhaps many more elections after that. After two years of making apologies for an ineffective President and clinging to the hope that he would reveal that his spineless capitulation on major issues was actually a strategic step in his master plan, they are finally talking openly about their feelings of having been betrayed.

Having helped elect the nation's first African-American president, many felt obligated and eager to give Obama a fair chance to settle into the job and find a way to overcome whatever lingering racism might impede his efforts. But his lack of dedication to the causes he was elected to champion has finally led his backers to concede that although race should not be a disqualification, neither should it be used to insulate a president from criticism. One can be both an African-American president and a bad president.

Mr. Obama's inexhaustible desire to get along with those who oppose his purported objectives has left progressives doubting that the goals he spoke of during his campaign were ever really close to his heart. Early on, when he realized he could attract vast contributions, he retreated from his pledge to accept only public funding, pretending that the lobbyists and special pleaders who gave him millions of dollars would not expect or receive anything in return. Even as he sought his party's nomination by promising to stop the wars, he interjected into his speeches the violent language of the militarists and said we must kill our enemies. Turning his back on key supporters, he gave a highly visible role in his inauguration to an opponent of civil rights. Relentlessly, he has trodden upon the hopes of those whom he swore to protect. And most recently, while pledging to protect Social Security, he struck a deal that will rob that system of the revenue it needs, paving the way for its collapse. He has outdone Bush by cutting needed taxes that no one was asking to have cut.

There may never have been any reason to expect anything more of Obama. He had an undistinguished career as a state senator, then went on to the U.S. Senate where he did virtually nothing except campaign for President. Once in the White House, he chose as his chief of staff a bully who had no desire to put the nation's or the president's interests above his own and an attorney general who is now harassing the very individuals who carried the banners of peace and justice under which Obama once paraded.

On his journey towards failure, Obama also had help - lots of it - within his own party. Instead of challenging him when he rejected their counsel, they played the loyal hacks. Misunderstanding their constitutional duty to be a co-equal branch of government, they mostly deferred to his limp plans. Taking the president and Democratic congress together, there was not enough backbone to support even a moderately strong policy.

The role the Republicans played deserves no more than a passing comment. They sabotaged their own country.

The situation is not hopeless, but progressives have some very difficult choices to make. First, they will have to decide whether they even want to bother working for the change that Obama preached about but did not try to deliver. To bring about this change, they will have to find new ways of doing things, and they can expect the entrenched powers to resist their efforts. They will have to struggle mightily and be willing to take personal risks, just to lay the groundwork for reforms that many of them will not see in their lifetimes. They will have to understand that the phrase of the Declaration of Independence, “when in the course of human events,” which led to a momentous revolution more than two hundred thirty years ago, starts with the word “when.” “When” is now.

Different President. Same Page.

Maybe I'm just getting old and my memory is fading. I seem to remember that Candidate Barack Obama said that we needed to "turn the page".

I thought he meant that if we elected him, we'd turn the page on the Bush Administration and it's wars of folly and tax cuts for the wealthy as a disingenuous substitute for economic stimulus. I now see I was wrong.

Obama meant turn the page on the old Democratic Party. Obama meant turn the page on the New Deal and Great Society. Obama meant turn the page on the middle class. He must have meant that because that's what his tax cut fake compromise does.

Remember Obama promising to cut poverty by 50% in the next decade. White House sources today said that what he really meant by that promise was that he'd cut taxes for  the wealthy so jobs can trickle down on the poor. I don't see the page turning there. We've had tax cuts for a decade and nothing trickled down but garbage. Obama promised sensible balanced tax policy, but gave us the same fake compassionate conservatism that George W. Bush promoted.

Obama promised to protect Social Security too, back during the campaign and as recently as this past summer. Today, Obama is championing FICA cuts that provide little meaningful stimulus and will ensure the now false arguments about Social Security going broke will become true. The cut is short term, but likely to become long term because no one will ever win the argument to reinstate the tax if it's given up now. Obama has put Social Security on the table. We didn't have to wait for a republican House or a republican Senate or a republican President. He put that on the table when Democrats control Congress and the White House. That is something that will haunt Democrats for decades as opposing Social Security did for republicans from 1935 until the 1980s.

Obama sure turned the page. It's not the page he claimed he'd turn and it's not the page we voted to turn. So, here's my question. Obama didn't run on the promise of trickle down economics, and he didn't win by courting conservatives, so how does he expect to win in 2012 now that he's told his old supporters to take a hike?

Grand Bargain on Social Security, Not So Grand, Not Much of a Bargain

Below, Carl Nyberg set forth what he called a "Grand Bargain" on Social Security. I disagree with the proposal on policy and political grounds.

Bad Policy

Social Security is Insurance

Social Security is often called an entitlement and even a ponzi scheme. It's neither. It's insurance. The point of insurance is that you have a lot of people, preferably everybody, paying into a system and fewer people get paid out less money than everyone pays in. The people paying in come from every walk of life, live in every type of situation and have different life expectancies. Social Security pays retirees with the money that comes in from the younger generation, with the interest on the money that's safely invested and it also has extra money from the people who don't retire or don't live long enough to cost more than they paid in. It's similar to health insurance that pays for the people who get sick with the money from the people who don't and the interest on all the money paid in over time and it's car insurance that pays for the accidents with all the money paid it from all the people over times when there have been no accidents, and the interest thereon over time. Insurance means you are spreading the risk around.

You Deplete the Fund When You Split it Up

Social Security being insurance means it's important to keep the fund whole. The people who are not yet retired should not be split from the ones who are. If you separate out people who are 70 from the people who are 60-70, you're taking away a viable part of the fund for the 70 year olds and that will deplete the fund that pays for these people. Such a proposal will cause the same problem we have with health insurance where the sick are all dumped into state pools and the healthy are in private groups. The state ends up paying out a bundle and the private sector makes the profits.

Better policy is to build up the fund rather than deplete it. Caps on the income subject to Social Security taxes protecting the wealthy who also take Social Security payments should be removed.

Private Social Security Accounts, Like 401ks, Add Administrative Costs, Put the Investment Risk on the Individual

Part 3 of the "Grand Bargain" is the Bob Dold approach to ending Social Security. It's the privatization plan that requires people to purchase private retirement accounts. Dold struggled with how the accounts would be regulated. At first, his plan was anything goes. An individual could invest in anything no matter the risk or the fees. When people pointed out that Wall Street investments put retirement dollars at risk and incur investment fees, Dold suggested the accounts be limited to investment in U.S. Treasuries. Treasuries are safe, but then all Dold did was create a huge administrative mess requiring reporting and accounting for individual accounts to replace that fairly well-run, streamline operation that is our current Social Security program.

At the time of the original Dold proposal, allowing any type of investment of the retirement accounts, I explained the investment risk flaw. The problem with privatizing retirement accounts is the exact same problem workers experienced when their employers replaced the old defined benefit plans with defined contribution plans (401k accounts). It was a risky scheme for the individual and hurt the retirees who got stuck with them. With DB plans, as with Social Security, the investment risk is on the payor. With private retirement accounts like 401K (DC plans) and these presently suggested retirement accounts, the investment risk is on the individual. So, when Wall Street fails, which is more likely than not these days, the individual investor gets less, or nothing.

The point of Social Security privatization is that it turns a well-run system into an administrative mess and produces fewer returns. It's a good way to end Social Security because after a while it won't be worth the effort. That turns us to politics.

Bad Politics

Being OK with Ignoring the Facts

The "Grand Bargain" ignores the facts that Social Security is not part of the deficit and the Social Security Trust Fund is not broke. Cutting Social Security should not be on the table at all  in a discussion of  the federal deficit. It further ignores the fact that the deficit is not the issue in the first place. republicans set the dialog that all of our economic problems spring from the deficit, a deficit they created with two unnecessary wars and tax cuts for the rich. The deficit is not the issue. Cutting programs that help the middle class are not the solution. Our problems stem from how we treat multi-national corporations that pass themselves off as people, as Americans. Corporations, specifically in the financial sector, but also in other industries, have run amok. They are over-subsidized and under-regulated. We spend fortunes subsidizing them and bailing them out, and they move our jobs overseas and pay no taxes into the system.

It relies on a common anti-Social Security theme that is not true. The intuitive seeming argument claims that the program is failing because people are living longer. It sounds right, but it's not true. From Dave Johnson of the Campaign for America's future:

The conventional wisdom is that life expectancy is increasing for everyone, which is not true. Over the past quarter century, life expectancy among men in the lower half of the income distribution has increased by only one year (as the retirement age increased by one year); they have not even caught up to the life expectancy of upper‐income men in 1982. Among lower income women, life expectancy has actually declined. (Stat from Harry C. Ballantyne, Lawrence Mishel and Monique Morrissey, “Briefing Paper #273: Social Security and the Federal Deficit, Not Cause and Effect,” Economic Policy Institute, August 6, 2010, p. 8. Available at http://epi.3cdn.net/99133adf653fd78719_qym6b95et.pdf

20 Cost of living adjustments available at http://www.ssa.gov/)

Moving the Conversation to the Right

Since Bush took office in 2001, we've had few if any progressive policies on the table. We've only discussed the degree to which conservative or down right wacko plans will be implemented. We don't talk about whether there should be tax cuts, just how much and who's taxes will be cut. We don't talk about providing access to health care, just how much we will pay insurers to be a little less horrible to their policy holders. This "Grand Bargain" does the same thing. It envisions privatizing retirement and decreasing payments and depleting the trust fund. This is the republican argument.  As explained in detail by Robert Reich, this only legitimizes republican arguments even when they're wrong.

Casting Social Security and all Programs that Help the American Middle Class as the Villain damages Progressivism, Liberalism

Creating schemes to cut Social Security and privatize Social Security as the cure for the "deficit problem" only serves to cast programs that help the middle class as the villain of this economic downturn saga. It's bad for progressivism and liberalism as it hands conservatives their main arguments, that government is bad, programs to help the middle class are bad, economic stimulus is bad. It fosters George W. Bush's ownership society and leaves the middle class in the dust and at the mercy of multinational corporations who employ them at their will and unemploy them on a whim to keep the stock price up in the short term.   

The Blame Will be Obama's, Democrats'

All we hear from the Obama administration, uber-Obama supporters and blue dog Democrats is that we have to solve this deficit problem. They parrot the republicans because they're afraid that republicans will use the deficit argument against them in 2012. That concedes that the deficit is the problem and takes all real solutions off the table ensuring ultimate failure. Obama will take the blame for an even worse economy.

Further, cutting and reorganizing Social Security to its eventual doom will also makes Obama THE President who undid Social Security and undid the middle class. As much as the right wants this, when it goes bad, they'll blame Obama for it. It's already happened with health care. Obama achieved a republican health care plan. It's the same plan republicans fought for for years, and now that he's implemented in nationally, they hate him for it and use it against him. If any of these hair-brained schemes to charge Social Security for the ills of multinational corporations succeed, Obama will be the guy who ended the best program this country ever had and it will set Democrats back decades like the Great Depression set republican back decades.

Speaks for Itself

U.S. Government Using Wikileaks' Assange/1917 Espionage Act to Silence Backlash to New Gilded Age? I Think We All Need to See What Info He Has on BOA and Do Not Want US Gov't Preventing that Leak.

As the government pursues Wikileaks' Julian Assange , I cannot help but think about the history of similar persecutions.

If the government has to drag out a little enforced, questionably constitutional post-WWI era law to prosecute Assange, there's probably a problem with the case. The U.S. government seeks to prosecute Julian Assange using the Espionage Act of 1917. It wasn't all that long ago that the Bush Administration was trying to silence all discussion about the invasion of Iraq with the Sedition Act of 1918.

Both laws were part of the original "Red Scare" and were used to squelch the growing progressivism and populism of the time, the backlash to the original gilded age. The laws have been little enforced for years and many legal scholars believe them to be unconstitutional. The Espionage Act was dragged out in the ill-fated attempt to persecute Daniel Ellsberg for leaking the Pentagon Papers. Fortunately, our country hadn't gone completely insane at that point and the Supreme Court let the case die under the weight of the vast Nixon Administration lies and crimes. It seems unlikely, we'll get a sane outcome as the Robert's court shrinks at nothing to protect the wealthy and powerful and Congress and the White House prefer to keep us at war and in economic depression to maintain the good will of their corporate campaign contributors.

The funny thing about the leaked State Department cables is that they don't say all that much. They contain mostly Jr. High School-ish gossip. The little they reveal isn't all that damaging except perhaps that our government went out of its way to hide information that most of us would have been better off if made public. Why our country wanted to hide the duplicity of many Middle Eastern countries, internally ginning up U.S. hatred while privately, not only agreeing, but wanting the U.S. to go further with Iran, is a mystery. Many suspected, but maybe we should have all understood the nature of the Karzai government before we committed so much to Afghanistan.

Far more damaging may be what's to come from Wikileaks. Assange claims to have information out of Bank of America. With Americans losing their homes and jobs to an economic crisis caused by the misdeeds of the financial sector, I have to wonder how far the U.S. government will go to protect its players. I also wonder how far the American people will let it go before they figure out that the leaks might be the last resort in finally fixing what's wrong in our country?

On the other side of things, it will be interesting to see how far the U.S. government goes to protect a real criminal, Dick Cheney, from bribery charges in Nigeria.

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Since Amazon.com agreed to take Wikileaks off it's server, I've pulled all Amazon ads off this blog. I know Amazon could probably care less about losing ads on this little site, but if lots of us simply forget to use Amazon for holiday shopping, it might send them a message.

Analysis of the The Citizens’ Commission on Jobs, Deficits and America’s Economic Future

We've heard the other side ad nauseum,  to grow the economy we have to shrink it, throwing money at a small number of already wealthy people creates jobs and it doesn't matter that we've already done this and never saw the jobs. With all the media and all the politicians blathering on nonsense about treating an economy of over 300,000,000 people like it's a family of 5 on a fixed income, we're long overdue to take a look at a different approach, a demand-side macro-economics approach, an approach that worked well once before, massive stimulus.

Those who like to downplay the New Deal claim that it never fixed the depression economy. They say that only WWII cured us of the first republican Great Depression. That proves the point exactly. The New Deal was fine, but it wasn't big enough. Circa 1937 republicans talked Roosevelt into slowing down spending stimulus and the country paid the price. WWII ultimately heated everything up in such a huge way, that the economic slowdown was turned around and that proved Roosevelt right in the first place. To fix a depression, you don't stop spending, you spend more. The country is not a family of 5, and is not on a fixed income. Spending creates jobs and jobs create income.

The The Citizens’ Commission on Jobs, Deficits and America’s Economic Future ("CCJ")  (organized by the Campaign for America's future and including economists, economic policy experts, activists and union leaders) gets that we need stimulus, not austerity. They issued their report on Tuesday and I live blogged the press event. Here is a more detailed analysis of their recommendations: