Channel surfing at the White House

I went to the White House Friday week for a full day listening and talking back to top White House officials with about 100 Democratic activists and organizers from California, organized by the Courage Campaign.
The White House folks seemed to listen hard. Gathered in an auditorium in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, we heard from top staff including chief of staff Bill Daley, senior advisors David Plouffe and Valerie Jarrett, EPA chief Lisa Jackson, and Labor secretary Hilda Solis, along with other staff on specific issues. They asked us not to offer specific quotes from people, but they didn't offer up any juicy secrets or stray from the administration talking points we've all heard before.
They got an earful of what they have certainly heard before as well: like many others across the country, we wanted the president to fight harder for bolder programs to reduce unemployment and address the foreclosure crisis.
There were a series of breakout sessions on a variety of issues: immigration, lesbian and gay rights, labor and environment. But the concerns were the same. Would the president fight harder? When would he compromise and how much would he give away? I was disappointed that the White House didn't offer a breakout session on a especially critical issue for Californians: the foreclosure crisis.
According to the White House, President Obama doesn't get credit for how he hard he has fought against tough foes and and an economic crisis he didn't create. They cited his recent, trip to the bridge between Rep. John Boehner's and Sen. Mitch McConnell's districts where he channeled former president Ronald Reagan, exhorting the Republican leaders, "Help us repair this bridge."
I keep wishing President Obama would channel FDR, who thought that government could actually work with people to solve problems, instead of Reagan, who preached that government was itself the problem, and that it should be starved, shrunk and gotten out of the way.
Channeling one of Reagan's pithy phrases might be OK, but we'll never reduce unemployment right now using the Gipper's approach.
For that, we'll need the fearless, positive, can-do approach of FDR, who knew that government could help when the private sector wouldn't. He never achieved his goal, according to William Leuchtenberg, in Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. That was to put ALL unemployed Americans in the Depression to work. His programs only created jobs about a third of them, but not for lack of trying.
Not all of his program was so simple, but some of it was. For example, he gave unemployed white-collar workers jobs teaching people to read.
While he didn't face the monolithic, intransigent opposition President Obama faces in Congress, he offered a bold and pragmatic vision that included vilifying the bankers whose wild speculation threw the country into Depression, and acknowledging that the country was a in a deep crisis that would require dramatic, sustained government action.
Measuring Obama's Jobs Act by the standard of what FDR was able to accomplish, you can see how his proposal falls short. If Republicans passed it whole, which is unlikely, it would create at most 1.9 million jobs, providing work for nowhere near one-third of the nation's unemployed.
Obama's plan appears to be motivated by fear - fear of failure, fear of Republican rejection, fear of alienating independent voters, when what we need is audacity.
It does not seem to be motivate by an audacious vision of government action that would actually get the country back to work.

The jobs plan still might not pass, but what people are hungry for, more than bipartisanship, is that audacious vision that Obama promised and FDR delivered.
Has President Obama been so busy channeling Reagan that he forgot what FDR said about fear?
Mr. President, tune in to the right channel!

Martin Column / Outrage / Uncategorized - 09/26/2011

Going to the White House

I've been a politics geek since I was about 10 years old and I went from reading the sports page of the Detroit News to the front page. I've been reading about it, arguing about it, covering it on some level as a journalist, and some times writing about it as an advocate, ever since.
So getting invited to the White House as part of a delegation of California activists, organizers and bloggers, organized by the Courage Campaign, is a big deal. A lot of us have expressed frustration with the Obama administration for it’s unwillingness to focus on jobs and housing in a more effective way, for its embrace of the austerity agenda, and its failure to hold bankers accountable in any meaningful way for the financial collapse that the whole country is still suffering from.
I was ambivalent about going at first, because this administration has sometimes seemed so determined not to get to it, to prize elusive bipartisanship over a strong fight for what’s right, for its cluelessness about the depth of the unemployment and housing crisis that continues to cause so much misery across the country.
That cluelessness was on display again in the past few days, when the president proclaimed no deficit deal would be fair without “shared sacrifice” that would require hedge fund managers to pay higher taxes while the government cut Medicaid. Does the president really believe that the sacrifice is equivalent – millionaires having to get by on a little less while people who are dependent on the government for health care get less care?
Even in planning our visit, the White House doesn’t seem to get it. We’ll have break-out sessions on education reform, the new health care law, lesbian gay transgender bisexual issues, the environment and labor – but no session on the foreclosure crisis and housing. The administration’s efforts in this area, so crucial to California’s economy, have been particularly lame. Whether or not the president’s staff wants to focus on it, I’m sure they will get an earful.
What I will suggest to the president’s people is that he’s vulnerable because he hasn’t done enough to reduce unemployment or to address the foreclosure crisis, and because too often he has accepted the Radical Republicans’ and the deficit hawks’ terms of the debate. When the president debates on those terms, he loses. We all lose.
Still, I don’t want to give up on the administration or the people who continue to put their faith in him. I’ll go in memory of my father, Irving Berg, who would be 90 this year. He saw great promise in Obama and wouldn’t allow frustration to cause me to give up on him, or fail to participate in some effort that might set Obama on a firmer course.
We meet with the president’s top staff on Friday all day. Any messages you want me to deliver?

Action / D.C. Disconnect / Foreclosures / Martin Column / Outrage / President Barack Obama - 09/22/2011

Party Like Its 1999

Today’s Census Bureau report on 2010 paints an unvarnished picture of the economic state of the union, and it’s not pretty.

The report confirms the damage done by the Wall Street debacle in 2008. The median income of American households fell by 6.4% from 2007. The median household income is 7.1% lower than it was at its peak, which occurred twelve years ago –in 1999. When you hear people talk about the “Lost Decade,” that’s what they mean.

The number of Americans in poverty jumped to 15.1% in 2010. A total of 46.2 million Americans were in poverty. That’s about 1 in every 6. The poverty rate grew almost 3 million from 2009, when 43.6 million, or 14.3 percent of Americans, were in poverty. The 2010 poverty level is the highest since 1983. More Americans are in poverty today than there were in 1959; but at least the rate has declined from around 23% in 1959.

But even these frightening statistics do not tell the whole story. Buried in the data was the fact that nearly a quarter of American families experienced “a poverty spell” lasting two or more months during 2009.

One measure of America has always been its promise of a better life for each succeeding generation. That principle is endangered too, the report shows. Twenty-two percent of Americans under 18 years old are in poverty. And the number of 25 to 34 year olds living with their parents rose 25% between 2007 and 2011.

Finally, the report contains some interesting demographic data pertinent to the politics of health care reform. Since 1987, the total number of Americans without health insurance has increased 40% - but remains at roughly 16% of the nation. Most Americans still get their health coverage from employers, but that number has dropped to 53% from about 65% in the late 1990s. A third of Americans are covered by government programs – a roughly 30% increase from 1987.

For people who feel like America is headed in the wrong direction, these numbers agree.

Harvey Column / Outrage - 09/13/2011

Bold Lite

Maybe President Obama's jobs plan will succeed in making congressional Republicans look bad before the 2012 election, especially if they reject it and demonize it as another socialist plot.

But even in the unlikely event that the congressional Republicans pass it whole, would the president's $440 billion grab bag offer significant solutions to Main Street’s most pressing problems – reducing the unemployment rate and halting the foreclosure crisis?

Probably not.

It’s true that the president and his administration did not dig the deep economic hole the country is in. And the president deserves some credit for stepping out of Washington’s deficit obsession bubble just long enough to recognize that nothing the government has done so far has been enough to lift those outside Wall Street out of that hole – the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.

But throughout his administration, and again last night, he has not offered big enough shovels, to dig us out of it.

As Paul Krugman [who labels the plan “a lot better than nothing”] points out, the collapse of the housing bubble blew a  $1 trillion a year hole in the economy, a hole that last night’s jobs plan won’t come close to filling.

But a comparison of the jobs plan’s $440 billion price tag with the unsuccessful $16 trillion bank bailout suggests its relative timidity. Remember that the federal government handed over that money to the bankers with no strings attached and no questions asked.

While the administration likes to tout the bank bailout’s success by bragging that most of the money has been repaid, by its most important measure – ensuring that the banking system helped restore the Main Street economy - it remains a costly failure.

Still you have to at least acknowledge that the bank bailout was a bold scheme. The same can’t be said for the American Jobs Act, which as the president stressed, was a collection of non-controversial proposals that even corporate Republicans have endorsed in the past.

Call it Obama’s “bold lite.”

Yes, it was bolder than what the president has suggested since the original $700 billion stimulus. It includes $240 billion of tax cuts and about $200 billion in infrastructure spending and aid to local governments, along with regulatory review, a vague housing scheme, plus a significant new round of budget cuts to pay for it, including unspecified threats to Medicare.

According to an estimate by Economic Policy Institute, the new plan, if passed whole, would create 2.6 million new jobs over the next several years and prevent the loss of another 1.6 million jobs.

That’s not chopped liver – but the country is still staggering under the weight of persistent 9 percent unemployment, with 14 million Americans unemployed, another 8.8 million working part-time but seeking fulltime work, and another 2.6 million who don’t show up in unemployment numbers because they’ve given up looking for work. In addition, we face a continuing foreclosure crisis and the threat of future budget cuts.

While I hope that the congressional Republicans don’t just decide to block the proposal, experience suggests that they are stuck on that strategy as a way to undermine the president. Will “a lot better than nothing” be good enough to help millions of Americans for whom the recovery has only been a mirage? Or is the president setting himself up, and the rest of us, for another round of dashed hopes and failure?

Uncategorized - 09/10/2011

The Neanderthals and the Cave-Man

With 63% of Americans envisioning an apocalyptic future in which wages drop, homes devalue, costs soar and government becomes irrelevant, a new film considers what happens when the angry masses take to the streets. I’m talking about “Before the Planet of the Apes,” James Franco’s latest flick.

I found myself sympathizing with the beleaguered apes, genetically engineered to want more of the American dream but suppressed and betrayed by the corporate fat cats, until finally an outraged ape mob busts loose and seizes the streets of San Francisco. If the intent was to conjure a metaphor, it failed right there: so far, the middle class in this country remains a silent, if not somnolescent, majority.

On the other hand, the nation is deep into a depressing era of Paleolithic Politics.

Neanderthals still walk the earth, as proven by Texas Governor Rick Perry – so retrograde in his views, so far removed from the consensus view of what America stands for, that the comparison might actually be an insult to the Neanderthals. According to a review of his “thinking” in the New York Times, Perry believes that old people should work till they die or live in abject poverty: he considers Social Security a disease and a fraud. Global warming? Fiction…. (just like that crazy theory that a big asteroid killed off his buddies, the Dinosaurs, and led to the Ice Age). Gays? Don’t get the Texas tough guy started.  Presumably they’d be in for the same treatment Perry alluded to when, speaking of Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, he said, “we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas.”

Who will shine the fierce light of five thousand years of knowledge, humanity and grace upon such as he?

Not, unfortunately, the Cave Man. As Drew Westen explained in the single most perceptive assessment of our President I have read, Obama doesn’t grasp “bully dynamics — in which conciliation is always the wrong course of action, because bullies perceive it as weakness and just punch harder the next time.” There seems to be no line in the sand that Obama will not at once retreat from, whether it is being forced to wait an extra day to address Congress, or any of a dozen key campaign pledges that inspired so many millions to vote for him. Last week, he caved on protections against ozone pollution developed by his own administration that were meant to safeguard our kids’ health. Before that, he caved to  lobbyists and approved a $7 billion intercontinental tar sand pipeline – a bailout for the energy industry that is guaranteed to become a taxpayer boondoggle. Remember when Mr. Obama said he would only support a budget bill that eliminated gratuitous tax cuts for the super-wealthy? Or allow consumers to select a non-profit health care plan rather than force people to buy a private plan from insurance companies at an unregulated price? Law professor Elizabeth Warren, one of the few people in this country capable of protecting consumers against greed-driven banks and credit card companies, was the obvious choice to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau – it was her idea to create it – until Wall Street vetoed her appointment by Obama.

Asked to respond to Perry’s intemperate comments, the President issued this gentle rejoinder: “You know, Mr. Perry just got in the presidential race and I think that everybody who runs for president probably takes them a little bit of time before they start realizing that this isn't like running for governor or running for senator or running for Congress, and you've got to be a little more careful about what you say. But I'll cut him some slack. He's only been at it a few days now.”

When he ran for President, Obama promised to bring a bipartisan spirit to D.C. This is one pledge he certainly kept. But the Republican opposition in Congress wanted none of it; their goal is to deny Obama any claim of success on any issue. They are after the Presidency in 2012.

This isn't some college debate. This is a fight over the future of our country. Obama is in it. He needs to fight back.

Congress / Harvey Column / Uncategorized - 09/07/2011