Rightwing terror in Missouri

1.26.2012 Leave a comment

Adam Peck of ThinkProgress stated:

Five Democratic State Senators in Missouri discovered large, orange crosshair stickers over their office nameplates on Tuesday in the Capitol Building in Jefferson. The targets included all four Democratic women in the state senate, as well as the Democratic minority leader. One Republican state representative also found a similar sticker outside his office.

It is ironic that these acts were likely committed in order to coerce the targeted Senators into voting to block the implementation of the Obama health care reform legislation. It is ironic because the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) is health care reform a Republican ought to love. But these facts do not impress America’s reactionary element. They just hate Obama.

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Obama’s foolish austerity project

7.18.2011 Leave a comment

As Barack Obama approached the conclusion of his July 15, 2011 press conference regarding the budget negotiations, he clearly threw down the gauntlet before the left:

And I have to say this is tough on the Democratic side, too. Some of the things that I’ve talked about and said I would be willing to see happen, there are some Democrats who think that’s absolutely unacceptable. And so that’s where I’d have a selling job, Chuck, is trying to sell some of our party that if you are a progressive, you should be concerned about debt and deficit just as much as if you’re a conservative. And the reason is because if the only thing we’re talking about over the next year, two years, five years, is debt and deficits, then it’s very hard to start talking about how do we make investments in community colleges so that our kids are trained, how do we actually rebuild $2 trillion worth of crumbling infrastructure.

If you care about making investments in our kids and making investments in our infrastructure and making investments in basic research, then you should want our fiscal house in order, so that every time we propose a new initiative somebody doesn’t just throw up their hands and say, “Ah, more big spending, more government.”

It would be very helpful for us to be able to say to the American people, our fiscal house is in order. And so now the question is what should we be doing to win the future and make ourselves more competitive and create more jobs, and what aspects of what government is doing are a waste and we should eliminate. And that’s the kind of debate that I’d like to have.

Marshall Auerback happily picks up the gauntlet:

You want a debate on this, Mr. President? Consider it done. In a nutshell, your proposed cuts will NOT set the stage for a “progressive agenda” going forward. The austerity measures contemplated by your Administration will suck income and wealth out of the private sector. This will cause private spending to fall, leading to yet more downsizing and unemployment. Tax revenues will decline further as corporate profitability sags, social welfare expenditures will rise as the automatic stabilizers kick in. And before you know it, we’ll be bumping up against that troublesome debt ceiling again, experiencing the same kind of political grandstanding that is characterizing today’s conflict, sort of like a nightmare version of “Groundhog Day”. The government will, in effect, be chasing its own tail. You will not “put the nation’s fiscal house in order”, Mr. President, but tear down its foundations even further.

Auerback continues:

The debate that the President is calling for, then, should not be focused on “affordability” but on what constitutes the national priorities of our government. The political process, not a non-existent gold standard, or a foolishly imposed debt ceiling of questionable constitutionality, should determine our national priorities. Promising jam tomorrow in exchange for “eating our peas” today might make for a good sound bite, but it is predicated on a fundamentally flawed model. The whole basis of our growth over the past quarter century has been based on households borrowing and the continuation of negative saving trends. A good place to start recovery efforts, therefore, would be to change this method of economic growth toward restoring incomes and job growth, rather than propping up zombie banks and embracing “rentier economics” through this misconceived emphasis of public debt reduction. No ostensible progressive can achieve anything close to the objectives ostensibly desired by the President, if we embrace his flawed economic thinking. Concerns about government deficits and the government debt have served as a very useful way of masking the real issue, the unwillingness of conservatives to allow the government to work for the good of the population, something that a democratic government is supposed to do.

Barack Obama, Wall Street’s man in Washington.

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What’s wrong with this thought?

2.28.2011 Leave a comment

E.J. Dionne, while discussing the Wisconsin conflict, asserted that:

It’s said that this fight is all about partisanship — and it’s true that Walker’s proposal is tougher on the most Democratic-leaning public-employee unions than on the ones more sympathetic to Republicans.

But this goes beyond partisanship. The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which swept away decades of restrictions on corporate spending to influence elections, has already tilted the political playing field toward the country’s most formidable business interests. Eviscerating the power of the unions would make Republicans and Democrats alike more dependent than ever on rich and powerful interests and undercut the countervailing strength of working people who, as those Kohler workers know, already have enough problems.

Even critics of public-employee unions should be able to recognize a power grab when they see one.

The key problem here, as I see it, is one of timing. Labor in the United States today hardly stands as a countervailing power to the power available to American capital and its political allies. Union membership as of 1.2011 amounts to 11.9% of the workforce, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Only 6.9% of private sector workers belong to a union while a mere 36.2% of America’s public sector workers belong to a union. Simply put, a fraction of America’s economic and political elite had already broken the union movement before Scott Walker put his name on the 2010 Wisconsin ballot. It used the Stagflation Crisis of the 1970-80s as a pretext on which to make a public assault on America’s unions. The AFL-CIO’s 1981 Solidarity March failed to intimidate the Reagan faction of the GOP or to embolden the remnants of the New Deal Coalition who cared about the fate of America’s working class. And it is because organized labor lacked the power to defeat the Reaganite onslaught of the 1980s that it ceased to provide a base from which sympathetic Democrats could contest the rightward drift of the American political elite.

The Democratic Party already depends upon and prefers the help it gets from big capital. Organized labor may have a seat at the big table, but it literally pays dearly for the meager results it gets for its money. One need only to consider the fact that both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama supported the horrible Blanche Lincoln in the 2010 Arkansas primary, and gave her this support even though a Lincoln nomination would only produce a defeat in November. Moreover, Obama’s election along with his very disappointing tenure as President supports nothing else but the conclusion that the leaders of the Democratic Party belong to the FIRE sector of the economy. In fact, one can measure Obama’s labor sympathies by the fight he made in support of the Employee Free Choice Act while President.

As for my take on Wisconsin: What we are seeing in Madison today is not organized labor fighting a state politician and his party in defense of the right of some workers to collectively bargain with the State of Wisconsin. Nor, for that matter, is the conflict a local instance of the national Democrats making a stand on behalf of its base. What we are seeing instead is a troubled part of American society defending itself against the predatory practices of a social and political system dominated by big capital, its money and its political allies. What about the legacy parties in Washington? As we know, they are already spoken for by their well-heeled friends. At least some Democratic Senators of the Wisconsin Senate had the nerve to flee to Illinois, thus saving the Party from colluding one more with the Republicans. That is far more than one could reasonably expect from the national Democrats.

Cross-posted at FireDogLake

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