Obama is now engaged in two illegal wars - in Libya and in Yemen. There was no Congressional debate or vote on these wars - and one is being waged by the CIA with unmanned drones. I think we have learned a little about what happens when you give the CIA carte blanche to run a war with no accountability except to a president who has a vested interest in covering up errors.
Source: andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com
So much for transparency: Apparently giving big money to the Obama campaign gives you very solid chances at getting an important gig at the White House
In 2007:
As a candidate, Obama spoke passionately about diminishing the clout of moneyed interests. Kicking off his presidential run on Feb. 10, 2007, he blasted “the cynics, the lobbyists, the special interests,” who had “turned our government into a game only they can afford to play.”
“We’re here today to take it back,” he said.
In 2011 [emphasis added]:
• Overall, 184 of 556, or about one-third of Obama bundlers or their spouses joined the administration in some role. But the percentages are much higher for the big-dollar bundlers. Nearly 80 percent of those who collected more than $500,000 for Obama took “key administration posts,” as defined by the White House. More than half the 24 ambassador nominees who were bundlers raised $500,000.
• The big bundlers had broad access to the White House for meetings with top administration officials and glitzy social events. In all, campaign bundlers and their family members account for more than 3,000 White House meetings and visits. Half of them raised $200,000 or more.
• Some Obama bundlers have ties to companies that stand to gain financially from the president’s policy agenda, particularly in clean energy and telecommunications, and some already have done so.
Source: hipsterlibertarian
Obama Tries to Sell Tax Deal to Democrats - David Herszenhorg and Sheryl Gay Stolberg
The problem with the compromise made to the GOP on tax cuts is that we shouldn’t have been painted into a corner. Obama managed to create a draw even though his chess pieces were in bad positions. But it means that his middle game blows: he had opportunity and chance earlier on, and they waited and waited, given the GOP time to force his hand at the 11th hour.
He’ll be judged less for last minute response to the ‘hostage taking’, and more for letting himself and the American people get into such a bad position in the first place.
We’re now at the brink of a new economic disaster that will eventually yank a chicken out of every pot. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities calculates that the extended Bush-era tax cuts will contribute by far the largest share to the next decade’s deficits — ahead of the recession’s drain on tax revenues, Iraq and Afghanistan war spending, TARP and Obama’s stimulus. The new Congress’s plan to block any governmental intervention on behalf of 15 million-plus jobless Americans guarantees that the unemployment rate, back up to 9.8 percent as of Friday, will remain intractable too.
Obama should have pounded home the case against profligate tax cuts for the wealthiest before the Democrats lost the Senate. Even now Warren Buffett — not a socialist, by the way — is making the case with a Christie-esque directness that usually eludes the president. “The rich are always going to say that, you know, just give us more money and we’ll all go out and spend more, and then it will trickle down to the rest of you,” he told Christiane Amanpour on “This Week” last Sunday. “But that has not worked the last 10 years, and I hope the American public is catching on.”
Everyone will have caught on by 2012, but that will be too late for many jobless Americans, let alone for Obama. As the economics commentator Jeff Madrick wrote in The Huffington Post, the unemployment rate has been above 7 percent only four times in a presidential election year since World War II — and in three of the four the incumbent lost (Ford, Carter, the first Bush). Reagan did win in 1984 with an unemployment rate of 7.2 percent, but the rate was falling rapidly (from a high of 10.8 two years earlier), and Reagan was as clear-cut in his leadership as Christie (only nicer).
Source: The New York Times
After the Democratic “shellacking” in the midterm elections, everyone wondered how President Obama would respond. Would he show what he was made of? Would he stand firm for the values he believes in, even in the face of political adversity?
On Monday, we got the answer: he announced a pay freeze for federal workers. This was an announcement that had it all. It was transparently cynical; it was trivial in scale, but misguided in direction; and by making the announcement, Mr. Obama effectively conceded the policy argument to the very people who are seeking — successfully, it seems — to destroy him.
So I guess we are, in fact, seeing what Mr. Obama is made of.
[…]
The truth is that America’s long-run deficit problem has nothing at all to do with overpaid federal workers. For one thing, those workers aren’t overpaid. Federal salaries are, on average, somewhat less than those of private-sector workers with equivalent qualifications. And, anyway, employee pay is only a small fraction of federal expenses; even cutting the payroll in half would reduce total spending less than 3 percent.
So freezing federal pay is cynical deficit-reduction theater. It’s a (literally) cheap trick that only sounds impressive to people who don’t know anything about budget realities. The actual savings, about $5 billion over two years, are chump change given the scale of the deficit.
Anyway, slashing federal spending at a time when the economy is depressed is exactly the wrong thing to do. Just ask Federal Reserve officials, who have lately been more or less pleading for some help in their efforts to promote faster job growth.
- Paul Krugman, Freezing Out Hope
Krugman falls short of saying Obama has switched parties, but makes his contempt for Obama’s capitulation pretty clear.
Freezing federal salaries is political theater, not deep policy, and is nothing more than sending a message. And what’s the message we are supposed to take away? While the Wall Streeters are partying with huge bonuses, and corporations are awash in record earnings?
And the real battle — the looming tax precipice, when Bush era tax cuts will end without Congressional action — what message is he sending to the GOP?
What principle is involved here? Harming a particular group of workers as a gesture, and not one that should be extended countrywide. Freezing salaries for all Americans would have a negative and chilling effect on the US economy at this point in the recovery. So all it does is make Obama look weak, and ungrounded. Running scared, when he should be pushing for more stimulus.
Krugman voices the concerns of those that voted Obama into office:
Mr. Obama almost seems as if he’s trying, systematically, to disappoint his once-fervent supporters, to convince the people who put him where he is that they made an embarrassing mistake.
Source: The New York Times
The Big Economic Story, and Why Obama Isn’t Telling It - Robert Reich
Quiz: What’s responsible for the lousy economy most Americans continue to wallow in?
A. Big government, bureaucrats, and the cultural and intellectual elites who back them.
B. Big business, Wall Street, and the powerful and privileged who represent them.
These are the two competing stories Americans are telling one another.
Yes, I know: It’s more complicated than this. In reality, the lousy economy is due to insufficient demand – the result of the nation’s almost unprecedented concentration of income at the top. The very rich don’t spend as much of their income as the middle. And since the housing bubble burst, the middle class hasn’t had the buying power to keep the economy going. That concentration of income, in turn, is due to globalization and technological change – along with unprecedented campaign contributions and lobbying designed to make the rich even richer and do nothing to help average Americans, insider trading, and political bribery.
So B is closer to the truth.
But A is the story Republicans and right-wingers tell. It’s a dangerous story because it deflects attention from the real problem and makes it harder for America to focus on the real solution – which is more widely shared prosperity. (I get into how we might do this in my new book, Aftershock.)
A is also the story President Obama is telling, indirectly, through his deficit commission, his freeze on federal pay, his freeze on discretionary spending, and his waivering on extending the Bush tax cuts for the rich.
Most other Washington Democrats are falling into the same trap.
If Obama and the Democrats were serious about story A they’d at least mention it.
I think Reich means “If Obama and the Democrats were serious about story B they’d at least mention it” otherwise the next part doesn’t make sense.
They’d tell the nation that income and wealth haven’t been this concentrated at the top since 1928, the year before the Great Crash. They’d be indignant about the secret money funneled into midterm campaigns. They’d demand Congress pass the Disclose Act so the public would know where the money comes from.
They’d introduce legislation to curb Wall Street bonuses – exactly what European leaders are doing with their financial firms. They’d demand that the big banks, now profitable after taxpayer bailouts, reorganize the mortgage debt of distressed homeowners. They’d call for a new WPA to put the unemployed back to work, and pay for it with a tax surcharge on incomes over $1 million.
They’d insist on extended unemployment benefits for log-term jobless who are now exhausting their benefits. And they’d hang tough on the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy – daring Republicans to vote against extending the cuts for everyone else.
But Obama is doing none of this. Instead, he’s telling story A.
Making a big deal out of the deficit – appointing a deficit commission and letting them grandstand with a plan to cut $4 trillion out of the projected deficit over the next ten years — $3 of government spending for every $1 of tax increase – is telling story A.
What the public hears is that our economic problems stem from too much government and that if we reduce government spending we’ll be fine.
Announcing a two-year freeze on federal salaries – explaining that “I did not reach this decision easily… these are people’s lives” – is also telling story A.
What the public hears is government bureaucrats are being paid too much, and that if we get the federal payroll under control we’ll all be better off.
Proposing a freeze on discretionary (non-defense) spending is telling story A. So is signaling a willingness to extend the Bush tax cuts to the top. So is appointing his top economic advisor from Wall Street (as apparently he’s about to do).
In fact, the unwillingness of the President and Washinton Democrats to tell story B itself promotes story A, because in the absence of an alternative narrative the Republican story is the only one the public hears.
Obama’s advisors explain the President’s moves are designed to “preempt” the resurgent Republicans – just like Bill Clinton preempted the Gingrich crowd by announcing “the era of big government is over” and then tacking right.
They’re wrong. By telling story A and burying story B, the President legitimizes everything the right has been saying. He doesn’t preempt them; he fuels them. He gives them more grounds for voting against raising the debt ceiling in a few weeks. He strengthens their argument against additional spending for extended unemployment benefits. He legitimizes their argument against additional stimulus spending.
Bill Clinton had a rapidly expanding economy to fall back on, so his appeasement of Republicans didn’t legitimize the Republican world view. Obama doesn’t have that luxury. The American public is still hurting and they want to know why.
Unless the President and Democrats explain why the economy still stinks for most Americans and offer a plan to fix it, the Republican explanation and solution – it’s big governmen’s fault, and all we need do is shrink it – will prevail.
That will mean more hardship for tens of millions of Americans. It will make it harder to remedy the bad economy. And it will set Republicans up for bigger wins in the future.
All because Obama is at heart a Republican.
Source: robertreich
Obama Has Lost Control OF His Narrative
- Richard Stevenson, The Muddled Selling of the President
Yes, he’s a liberal, except when he’s not. He’s antiwar, except for the one he’s escalating. He’s for bailouts, but wants to rein in the banks. He’s concentrating ever-more power in the West Wing, except when he’s being overly deferential to Congress. He’s cool, except when he’s fighting-hot.
In a world that presents so many fast-moving and intractable problems, nuance, flexibility, pragmatism — even a full range of human emotions — are no doubt good things. But as Mr. Obama wrapped up his State of the Union address on Wednesday night with an appeal to transcend partisan gamesmanship, he was plaintively testing a broader proposition: Is it possible to embrace complexity in a political and media culture that demands simple themes and promotes conflict?
The president, whose hallmark has been ideological eclecticism, would clearly like to think the answer is yes. But a year into his presidency, Mr. Obama has lost control of his political narrative, his ability to define the story of his presidency on his own terms. And the main reason is that his story is no longer so simple or easy to tell.
He lost ‘hope’ and ‘change’, and is falling into ‘war’, ‘bank bailout’ and ‘depression’.
He is no FDR, or JFK. Is he Hoover?
Source: The New York Times
US Buying The Allegiance Of A Pashtun Tribe
Afghan Tribe to Fight Taliban in Return for Aid From U.S.
The leaders of one of the largest Pashtun tribes in a Taliban stronghold said Wednesday that they had agreed to support the American-backed government, battle insurgents and burn down the home of any Afghan who harbored Taliban guerrillas.
Map
Elders from the Shinwari tribe, which represents about 400,000 people in eastern Afghanistan, also pledged to send at least one military-age male in each family to the Afghan Army or the police in the event of a Taliban attack.
In exchange for their support, American commanders agreed to channel $1 million in development projects directly to the tribal leaders and bypass the local Afghan government, which is widely seen as corrupt.
Definitely 13th century politics going on. The US end runs the Afghan government, makes a deal with tribal chieftans which includes buying their loyalty with direct cash payments so they will buy the Taliban’s houses down.
More pragmatism, more Obamaism.
Why are we in Afghanistan, again?
In other news, the US government has made a cash deal with the Crips of East LA to aggressively rout the Bloods, including burning their houses down.
Tomorrow’s Headline: Obama Uses State Of The Union Speech To Change Parties
In a stunning move, President Obama announced last night during the State Of The Union address that he has decided to become a Republican. “I have long struggled with where I believe the country should go, and I have decided to follow my heart, which is pulling me strongly in this direction.”
During the speech, President Obama pledged to drop health care reform and greenhouse gas emissions control, dramatically cut spending, cut taxes, and continue military operations in Asia indefinitely. “I have come to believe that the best way to stimulate the US economy is to leave more hard earned money in the hands of those that earned it, and curtail support for the economically unproductive. It’s only logical,” he stated, in a Spock like voice.
The Democrats are scrambling to determine what this means, but it seems that most of the positions that Obama pledged during the election — and which he has had great difficulty accomplishing to date — have been junked.
The People Are Hungry, Mr President
Nearly one in five Americans said they lacked the money to buy food at some point in the last year, according to a survey co-sponsored by the Gallup organization and released by an anti-hunger group. The numbers soared at the start of the current recession, but dipped in 2009 despite the continuing rise in unemployment. The anti-hunger group, the Food Research and Action Center, attributed that trend to falling food prices, rising enrollment for food stamps and an increase in the amount of the food stamp benefit. More than 38 million Americans — one in eight— now receive food stamps, a record high.
Can we stop fiddling around and get moving on jobs? Where’s the ‘broom ready’ infrastructure work? The winterization and solarization of homes? Fixing the bridges? Tearing down the dams? Reforesting?
Obama is going to talk it up tonight, but where’s the jobs?
Source: The New York Times
Obama Is Tone-Deaf
- Jackie Calmes, Obama to Propose Freeze on Some Spending to Trim Deficit
Because Mr. Obama plans to exempt military spending while leaving many popular domestic programs vulnerable [like nutrition, education, and farm subsidies], his move is certain to further anger liberals in his party and senior Democrats in Congress, who are already upset by the possible collapse of health care legislation and the troop buildup in Afghanistan, among other things.
Fiscally conservative Democrats in the House and Senate have urged Mr. Obama to support a freeze, and it would suggest to voters, Wall Street and other nations that the president is willing to make tough decisions at a time when the deficit and the national debt, in the view of many economists, have reached levels that undermine the nation’s long-term prosperity. Perceptions that government spending is out of control have contributed to Mr. Obama’s loss of support among independent voters, and concern about the government’s fiscal health could put upward pressure on the interest rates the United States has to pay to borrow money from investors and nations, especially China, that have been financing Washington’s budget deficit.
Republicans were quick to mock the freeze proposal. “Given Washington Democrats’ unprecedented spending binge, this is like announcing you’re going on a diet after winning a pie-eating contest,” said Michael Steel, a spokesman for the House Republican leader, Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio.
It all makes sense: cut domestic programs, because Obama believes that fighting wars in Asia — and taxing us and our kids to pay for it — is fine policy, makes big companies rich, and it is full of testosterone. Meanwhile let’s cut domestic programs, because who cares about school lunches, or better farm policies, or the federal parks.
It seems that Obama is continuing to compartmentalize every decision without seeing the pattern that is emerging. He doesn’t give a shit about people, he’s here to help some abstract notion of humanity, and people just get in the way.
Source: The New York Times
Obama Undoes Himself
- Bob Herbert, Obama’s Credibility Gap
Mr. Obama may be personally very appealing, but he has positioned himself all over the political map: the anti-Iraq war candidate who escalated the war in Afghanistan; the opponent of health insurance mandates who made a mandate to buy insurance the centerpiece of his plan; the president who stocked his administration with Wall Street insiders and went to the mat for the banks and big corporations, but who is now trying to present himself as a born-again populist.
Mr. Obama is in danger of being perceived as someone whose rhetoric, however skillful, cannot always be trusted. He is creating a credibility gap for himself, and if it widens much more he won’t be able to close it.
Too pragmatic, too facile, always looking to split the difference instead of taking a stand.
Mr. Obama promised during the campaign that he would be a different kind of president, one who would preside over a more open, more high-minded administration that would be far more in touch with the economic needs of ordinary working Americans. But no sooner was he elected than he put together an economic team that would protect, above all, the interests of Wall Street, the pharmaceutical industry, the health insurance companies, and so on.
How can you look out for the interests of working people with Tim Geithner whispering in one ear and Larry Summers in the other?
In cahoots with big money and the oligarchs.
Mr. Obama will deliver his State of the Union address Wednesday night. The word is that he will offer some small bore assistance to the middle class. But more important than the content of this speech will be whether the president really means what he says. Americans want to know what he stands for, where his line in the sand is, what he’ll really fight for, and where he wants to lead this nation.
They want to know who their president really is.
I am afraid we have already learned who he is, and it’s not the picture he painted during the campaign. He’s a moderate Republican who was elected by progressives and independents, which is leading to the country shifting right.
Source: The New York Times
Go Figure
I am from Boston. I know that people in Massachusetts can be a bit convoluted in their political logic. I dare you to read the tea leaves in the Scott Brown election:
- John Harwood, For Top Economic Aides, a Shaky Week in Office
A poll by The Washington Post, the Harvard School of Public Health and the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation found that Tuesday’s voters opposed the health care legislation in Washington 48 percent to 43 percent. But 68 percent backed the state’s own system of near-universal coverage, whose core elements were the model for Mr. Obama and the Democrats.
Come again? What was this a referendum on?
Source: The New York Times
Matt Bai on The Great Unalignment
- Matt Bai, The Great Unalignment
Even more consequential [than the swing from pork to ideology in politics], though, is the fast-growing swath of voters who can summon no affinity for either party. As in other aspects of modern American life, brand allegiance in politics is at an all-time low; more than a third of Americans (and more than half of all Massachusetts voters) identify themselves as independents rather than as members of the blue team or the red. The most prevalent ideology of the era seems to be not liberalism nor conservatism so much as anti-incumbency, a reflexive distrust of whoever has power and a constant rallying cry for systemic reform.
And so the fundamental mistake that Republican and Democratic strategists each made after their respective takeovers was to believe that their victories represented an ideological shift among independent voters, the kind of sweeping philosophical reassessment — Hey, you know what? We really do need a big centralized government! — that would empower a party for generations to come. In fact, far from swinging wildly between conservatism and liberalism, a critical mass of dissatisfied Americans cast the exact same vote in 2006 as they did in 1994 — a vote against entrenched power in the Capitol. The only real difference between those two elections lay in which party happened to be holding the gavel at the moment of revolt.
On a deeper level, the fading dream of realignment also reflects our attitudes about permanence in a society that judges its digital TVs by their “refresh rates” — that is, the number of times per second that the pixels on the screen rearrange themselves to create a more eye-popping picture than the one that just existed. In an accelerated culture, our loyalties toward just about everything — laundry detergents, celebrities, even churches and spouses — transfer more readily than our grandparents could have imagined. Now we dispose of phone carriers and cash-back credit cards from one month to the next, forever in search of some better deal.
And a nation with almost 35% of the electorate self-identifying as Independents has serious alignment issues. We don’t need a politician, we need a chiropractor.
Source: The New York Times
Frank Rich Is On The Money: It’s About Money
In contrast to Friedman, Frank Rich knows what Obama has to do: focus on the money.
- Frank Rich, After the Massachusetts Massacre
Obama’s plight has been unchanged for months. Neither in action nor in message is he in front of the anger roiling a country where high unemployment remains unchecked and spiraling foreclosures are demolishing the bedrock American dream of home ownership. The president is no longer seen as a savior but as a captive of the interests who ginned up the mess and still profit, hugely, from it.
That’s no place for any politician of any party or ideology to be. There’s a reason why the otherwise antithetical Leno and Conan camps are united in their derision of NBC’s titans. A TV network has become a handy proxy for every mismanaged, greedy, disloyal and unaccountable corporation in our dysfunctional economy. It’s a business culture where the rich and well-connected get richer while the employees, shareholders and customers get the shaft. And the conviction that the game is fixed is nonpartisan. If the tea party right and populist left agree on anything, it’s that big bailed-out banks have and will get away with murder while we pay the bill on credit cards — with ever-rising fees.
Politically, no other issue counts. In last weekend’s Washington Post/ABC News poll, 42 percent of Americans chose the economy as the country’s most pressing concern. Only 5 percent picked terrorism, and 2 percent Afghanistan. Obama’s highest approval ratings are now on foreign policy and national security issues — despite the relentless hammering from the Cheney right — but voters don’t care.
[…]
On the economic front, Obama needs both stylistic and substantive makeovers. He has stepped up the populist rhetoric lately — and markedly after political disaster struck last week — but few find this serene Harvard-trained lawyer credible when slinging populist rhetoric at “fat-cat” bankers. His two principal economic policy makers are useless, if not counterproductive, surrogates. Timothy Geithner, the Treasury secretary, was probably fatally compromised from the moment his tax lapses surfaced; now he is stalked by the pileup of unanswered questions about the still-not-transparent machinations at the New York Fed when he was knee-deep in the A.I.G. bailout. Lawrence Summers, the top administration economic guru, is a symbol of the Clinton-era deregulatory orgy that helped fuel the bubble.
The White House clearly knows this duo is a political albatross. After the news broke that 85,000 more jobs had been lost in December despite some economists’ more optimistic predictions, Christina Romer, a more user-friendly (though still academic) economic hand, was dispatched to the Sunday shows. This is at best a makeshift solution.
Obama needs more independent economists like Paul Volcker, who was hastily retrieved from exile last week after the Massachusetts massacre prompted the White House to tardily embrace his strictures on big banks. Obama also needs economic spokesmen who are not economists and who can authentically speak to life on the ground. Obama must also reconnect. The former community organizer whose credit card was denied at the Hertz counter during the 2000 Democratic convention now spends too much time at the White House presiding over boardroom-table meetings and stiff initiative rollouts instead of engaging with Americans not dressed in business suits.
When it comes to economic substance, small symbolic gestures (the proposed new bank “fee”) won’t cut it. Nor will ineffectual presidential sound bites railing against Wall Street bonuses beyond the federal government’s purview. There’s no chance of a second stimulus. The White House will have to jawbone banks on foreclosures, credit card racketeering and the loosening of credit to small businesses. This means taking on bankers who were among the Obama campaign’s biggest backers and whose lobbyists have castrated regulatory reform by buying off congressmen of both parties. It means pressing for all constitutional remedies that might counter last week’s 5-to-4 Supreme Court decision allowing corporate campaign contributions to buy off even more.
Obama should clear his desk, fire Geithner and Summers, and bring in Volker and Krugman. He must go to battle against the bankers, the mortgage holders, and push stimulus to get jobs created. He has to solve the foreclosure mess, and fast.
Even pushing the green agenda should come as an aspect of new works programs, not the other way around.
Obama has got to show, clearly, that the government is working for us, for main street, and not just say it while going soft on the bankers. He has to become a man of the people, not just a brain with a conscience.
Source: The New York Times
Erratic inquiries of Stowe Boyd, who means well, despite everything.
