Can left & right unite – against cat food diet?

If our dysfunctional politicians can collaborate to do the bidding of the 1 percent, why can’t members of the 99 percent find ways to work with those we disagree with to protect all of our interests?

Specifically, can progressive Democrats who oppose President Obama’s proposed cuts to Social Security work with members of the Tea Party who also oppose the cuts – along with everything else the president does?

The gulf between these two groups is obviously deep and wide.

Rank and file Democrats tend to want to put government to work in their interests, and believe that it can. Meanwhile, the Tea Party sees the government as the perpetual problem, and the only good thing it could do is ... disappear altogether.

But on the single issue of Social Security, the two groups appear to enjoy a rare agreement – along with most of the rest of the country.

According to this 2011 Marist poll, voters identified with the Tea Party oppose cuts to Social Security nearly as strongly as voters from across the political spectrum: nearly 8 in 10 Tea Partiers are against the cuts. Of all voters, slightly more than 8 in 10 dislike such cuts.

As for the president, he would rather not be seen as cutting Social Security benefits at all. What he’s suggesting is a change to the way cost of living adjustments are calculated, called chained CPI, in exchange for more tax hikes. Supporters say chained CPI is more accurate because it reflects how people actually react to price increases.

According to this theory, if the price of hamburger goes up, people will switch to beans. So why should the government give you more money to buy hamburger, if you’re just going to go out and eat beans? Under chained CPI, Social Security benefits would be limited to increases in the cost of beans. As economist Michael Hudson says of chained CPI, “It’s not really a cost of living index. It’s a cost of lower living standards index.”

Naked Capitalism’s Yves Smith has labeled it, “the cat food index.”

For many rank and file Democrats, it’s a bitter betrayal of President Obama’s 2012 campaign pledge to strengthen the middle class. It’s also a reversal of one of Obama’s unequivocal campaign promises as a candidate back in 2008. Drawing a contrast to his opponent, John McCain, Obama said McCain favored raising the retirement age and reducing Social Security cost of living adjustments. “Let me be clear,” candidate Obama said. “I will not do either.”

Stopping the president’s scheme will take more than just the efforts of his disgruntled base. President Obama seems to welcome their opposition, wearing it as a badge of honor. He would like people to think he’s making a principled, political sacrifice for the greater good of the country against the wishes of his own base.

Getting the 99 percenters in the Democratic base to work with their opposite numbers in the Tea Party might not be as outlandish as it first appears.

One of the founders of the Tea Party has already been reaching out to Democratic Party activists to discuss specific issues. Earlier this year, Mark Meckler met with MoveOn.org’s Joan Blades.about crony capitalism and with activist Jose Antonio Vargas  about immigration. These talks haven’t yielded action – yet. Here’s Meckler talking about it.

The Tea Party has its own links to the 1 percent that undermine its credibility as a grassroots activist movement – and its ability to fight for the interests of ordinary Americans.

The Tea Party has been closely linked to the Club for Growth and Freedomworks, big-money conservative Republican operations that in the past have pushed for privatization of Social Security, most recently pushed by President George W. Bush. Privatization would be a financial bonanza for Wall Street… and would have been a catastrophe for the rest of us if George Bush’s 2005 plan had gone into effect. Most Americans would have lost all their benefits in the great crash of 2008.

Earlier this month, when one conservative Oregon Republican member of Congress criticized the president’s Social Security scheme as “a shocking attack on seniors,” the Club for Growth threatened to find an even more conservative Republican to run against him. The Club for Growth apparently thinks chained CPI is a good downpayment on further, deeper Social Security cuts down the road.

Members of the Tea Party will have to decide whether they want to work for the interests of the elites in Club for Growth and Freedomworks or join with other ordinary citizens to fight for their own interests. (Meckler quit his leadership role with the Tea Party, saying it was becoming too top down)

The Democratic base will face its own challenges. Is it prepared to fight the president and Democratic leadership that,not so long ago it worked so hard to elect, and has defended so vociferously, despite growing income inequality and continuing high unemployment?

If the two groups found a way to move beyond their disagreements, that would really be something fresh in American politics, showing leadership to replace stale rhetoric with robust action in support of the majority of Americans. Not only could that coalition mobilize a successful campaign against Social Security cuts, it could throw a genuine scare into a complacent political class and the 1 percent it serves.

 

Four ways to tell if President Obama was lip-syncing

So it turns out that Beyonce’s ardent, flawless performance of the Star-Spangled Banner may have been lip-synced. The more important and far trickier question is whether President Obama’s impassioned promise to fight for the middle class and a just society is for real, or just more lip service.

The president pushed all the right buttons to our inspire our belief, crafting a theme of “We the people,” defending the importance of collective efforts and evoking battlefields in the people’s fight for justice, from March on Selma to Seneca Falls to the Stonewall bar. And he took the oath of office with his hand on Martin Luther KIng’s traveling bible, the one the civil rights leader carried with him and scribbled notes in as he led the movement.

Many people have invested their hopes and dreams in the president’s leadership and are willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on the tepid economic recovery and unkept promises. I thought it was a terrific speech but I’m less giddy about the speech and our prospects for the next four years.

One source of my skepticism is the president’s choice to replace Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, under whose leadership, blessed by the president, the too big to fail banks got bigger, no bankers were held accountable for the financial collapse, and the government’s efforts to clean up the foreclosure mess floundered. Geithner, meanwhile, ridiculed efforts by others on the Obama economic team who wanted to fight for a bigger stimulus that would have helped others who weren’t bankers.

To replace Geithner, the president chose his chief of staff Jacob Lew, who enjoyed a brief, highly paid stint at  too big to fail Citigroup from 2006 to 2009, as a manager in a unit that bet against the housing market in the run-up to the financial collapse. After Citigroup reaped its share of the taxpayer-funded bailout, the bank awarded Lew a $950,000 bonus. Before his service to Citigroup, he served as head of the Office of Management and Budget during the Clinton administration, which gave bank deregulation its final push into reality. Of his Citigroup gig, Robert Kuttner wrote, “It was mainly a chance for a skilled public manager to make himself some money until the Democrats returned to power.”

Especially troubling is the lack of expertise Lew demonstrated in comments during a 2010 Senate hearing, where he candidly acknowledged he was not particularly sophisticated in his financial understanding – but went on to downplay the role of deregulation in the financial meltdown.

“My sense, as someone who has generally been familiar with these trends is that the problems in the financial industry preceded deregulation; there was an increasing emphasis on highly abstract leveraged derivative products that got us to the point that in the period of time leading up to the financial crisis risks were taken, they weren’t fully embraced, they weren’t well understood,” Lew said. “I don’t personally know the extent to which deregulation drove it but I don’t believe that deregulation was the proximate cause. I would defer to others who are more expert about the industry to try and parse it better than that.”

But the even the grandaddy of financial deregulation himself, Alan Greenspan, has acknowledged what a fiasco it was. As the Consumer Education Foundation pointed out in its March 2009 report, co-authored with Essential Information, “financial deregulation led directly to the financial collapse” by allowing banks to concoct and sell complex investments based on worthless mortgages – without any government oversight or interference.

Regardless of his expertise or lack of it in high finance, Lew is a member in good standing of the elite financial industry – government corridors of power that have been peddling austerity – a particularly hostile landscape for the hopes and dreams of the middle class. Is this really the person Obama believes is best to lead the economic team that is supposed to protect the middle class? If Obama is serious about following through about his inaugural speech promises to protect and preserve economically vulnerable Americans, he’s going to need a much more ambitious  and specific agenda than he’s offered so far, and he’s going to need to abandon some major policies he’s been pursuing.  And he’s going to need a cabinet and a political team to flesh those policies out, sell them to the country and skillfully push them through Congress. Lew will have to reach way beyond his comfort zone, in which he has functioned as a quintessential insider and number-cruncher.

A great inaugural speech is not about to convince the vast corporate interests that have poisoned our politics to pack up and go home.

To truly protect the middle class, the president is going to have get outside the austerity bubble that Washington has built up around itself with the help of the media wise men and women who judge political courage and wisdom by how much our leaders are willing to slash from social programs.

The way to protect the middle class is straightforward – but demands a departure from the conventional thinking that rules Washington.

Economist Robert Pollin suggests two very specific –  and grand  – goals for Obama to shoot for. First, cut unemployment in half by the end of 2016, back to 3.9 percent, where it was in 2000, creating an additional 13 million jobs, through a combination of federal stimulus funding,and grabbing the excess funds that the Federal Reserve has shoveled to banks. While bankers have profited from the Fed’s generosity, they have not used those funds to spur the broader economy. Here’s an interview in which Pollin details his views.

The second is creating a real program to fight and reverse rising poverty in the U.S., reducing the number of people living in poverty from 15 to 11 million, again aiming to reduce the poverty to 2000 levels. Again, Pollin says the best way to do this is by focusing on resources on job creation.

Inside Washington’s austerity bubble, this idea of dramatically reducing unemployment or poverty is never discussed any more, amid assumptions that either people are poor because of their own failings or the government can’t afford to do anything about it.

But outside the bubble, economists like Pollin and others suggest another path, and if Obama is serious about the ideals he articulated in his speech, he’ll lead the fight to burst the austerity bubble, embracing this more activist path.

If he’s really intent on helping average Americans, there are two policies President Obama is pursuing that he should immediately discard, because they will hurt the middle class.

The first is the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the latest in a long line of so-called free trade agreements like the North American Free Trade Agreement, that have been sold to the public as boosts to the economy but have really crushed low and middle income jobs by increasing outsourcing and lowering wages. While the TPP talks exclude the public, corporate lobbyists have free access.

The president and his team should acknowledge the dangers to America of these phony free trade deals, and abandon the TPP and others like them.

The president should also drop the idea of “tweaking” Social Security by adopting “chained CPI,” which is a way of calculating the “cost of living” that would reduce future Social Security payments. The president has suggested that “chained CPI” could be part of fiscal grand bargain to reduce the deficit. While the president has touted the plan as a kind of a technical fix that would strengthen the program in the long run, Social Security watchdogs say chained CPI would result in substantial benefit reductions.

You’ll know the president is serious about keeping his promise to protect the middle class when you see him following through on this short list.

 

D.C. Disconnect: Whose cliff is this?

Think big money didn’t win in the last election? Think again.

It’s a pretty safe bet that the majority of Americans who voted for President Obama didn’t want unemployment to go up and the safety net shredded.

But we’re now in the midst of some  extended Washington lunacy over the “fiscal cliff” negotiations, with both sides trying to whip the public into a frenzy with scary scenarios of economic hardship

Is this what the majority voted for?

I don’t think so.

This is what America’s CEOs want. If they’re going to be forced to pay slightly more in taxes, they want cuts to Social Security and Medicare in exchange – even if those programs have nothing to do with the federal government’s budget deficit.

If you’re looking for a reason why our leaders would so eagerly flout the will of the majority, you might start with the money spent in the recent election – one of the most expensive in history.

Which brings is back to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling. One of the big mistakes the Supreme Court made in the Citizens United case unleashing corporate spending in politics was in its overly literal definition of how money works in elections.

Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy said independent corporate spending does “not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption” and “influence over or access to elected officials does not mean that these officials are corrupt.”

According to the justices, corruption is defined only by a very specific quid pro quo.

Those who are dismissing the role of big corporate donors in the 2012 elections are making a similar misjudgment: Just because some of the most notorious big spenders, Sheldon Adelson and the Koch Brothers, didn’t win.

So the fact that Adelson, the Las Vegas mogul, and the Kochs, the energy magnates, couldn’t buy the election for Mitt Romney, means that the role of big money has been exaggerated, according to some analysts. “Spending by outside groups. it turns out,” the Washington Post reported, “was the dog that barked but did not bite.”

This isn’t the right way to view the 2012 election results, or the influence money has in our politics. Rather than focus on who wins and who loses in a particular race, or whether a particular bill is passed or defeated, we need to examine whose interests benefit, especially over a long period of time.

That’s what those big donors are after – gains over the long term. For example, the financial industry fought for 20 years before it finally won repeal of Glass-Steagall, the Depression-era law that kept separate publicly-insured banking from riskier bank investing.

Most donors and politicians are more sophisticated than to offer flat-out bribes. Elected officials, donors and lobbyists long ago learned to speak in code they understand but sounds innocuous to the public. In the case of Glass-Steagall, the bankers and their backers didn’t say they wanted to make gajillions while leaving taxpayers on the hook for bailouts when the bankers’ bets went bad. No, what they talked about publicly was “modernizing” antiquated banking laws.

A more recent example is the work of the man who Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik dubbed the “influential billionaire in national politics.” He’s not one of the Koch Brothers or Adelson. He’s former Nixon Commerce secretary and retired hedge fund mogul Pete Peterson, who has spent $457 million in the past 5 years in a campaign to convince the politicians and public that “entitlements” are in crisis and need to be cut. He has gathered around him leading politicians, intellectuals and corporate CEOs. What do all they share? The conviction that if there’s a problem with the federal budget, those who are most vulnerable economically should have to suffer to fix it.

That’s why we end up with our current debate and the “fiscal cliff” focused on the government deficit, not creating jobs and repairing the housing mess.

That’s why we end with a political debate that somehow manages to equate cuts to badly needed social programs for people still hurting from the recession with tax increases for the nation’s wealthiest.

Peterson isn’t focused on the result of one election or one skirmish in the battle over the safety net. He’s in it for the long haul.

As for Adelson, he is learning from his 2012 mistakes so he can invest his millions more successfully in pursuit of his anti-government agenda.

While President Obama has criticized the Citizens United ruling and supported a constitutional amendment to overturn it, neither he nor the Democrats are about do without their mega-donors and super-PACs in the meantime, nor are they about to make money in politics it a priority.

In this atmosphere, will the president keep his promises to fight for the interests of the middle class for increased economic security and better jobs?

The politicians’ chase for the big money is like the nuclear arms race of the 1950s and 60s between the U.S. and Russia, which both sides acknowledged was a disaster for their economies. Neither side was willing to give up. Meanwhile, more and more of the expensive, dangerous weapons were stockpiled. There’s an important difference, however: our politicians and corporate chieftains have grown fatter on the current money race in politics. The ones who are facing a dire threat  to our existence are the rest of us.

Still too close to call

The president won the election by convincing a majority of voters that he was the genuine protector of the middle class.

His opponent ran as a shape-shifter, one day a rabid Tea Partier, the next a moderate. But among the many conflicting themes Mitt Romney tried out in his unsuccessful presidential campaign, one that he clung to was the out of control federal deficit and the need to rein in spending on the nation’s safety net programs.

As you recall, both the president and Romney stressed that the election was about the best way to create jobs.

But now President Obama says he will spend some of his precious time hitting the campaign trail again, this time trying to sell the American people on why it’s a good idea to agree to some cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid as part of a “grand bargain” with congressional Republicans to avoid going over the so-called fiscal cliff, a set of congressionally-self imposed tax increases and budget cuts. The president is adamant that taxes on the rich will have to go up as part of a “grand bargain,” which of course, Republicans, Wall Street and corporate CEOs all adamantly oppose. Their opposition has created a false consensus inside the Beltway that maintains that essential programs such as Social Security and Medicare are unsustainable.

Voters might be forgiven if they’re surprised by this wheeling and dealing over Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, as Matt Bai writes in the New York Times, “The possible terms of a grand bargain never came up because neither side [during the campaign] wanted to talk about it.”

But all of a sudden that’s all our leaders are focused on, when they’re not consumed with David Petraeus’ sex life and shirtless FBI agents.

Where’s the jobs program?

The president has been hanging tough on the need to raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans but now seems to be waffling about protecting Social Security and the other safety net programs that protect the well being of hundreds of millions of Americans after a lifetime of work. In negotiations with Republicans during his first term, the president had already offered to make cuts in the safety net.

Unions and progressive groups say they are now mobilizing to protect the social safety net. But will they buck the president if he deems such cuts necessary to make a deal with Republicans?

Dave Dayen at Firedoglake, who has followed the assault on social insurance programs, expresses doubts.  Noting that polls show a majority of the public is opposed to such cuts, Dayen wrote: “The Obama coalition has always been more tribal than ideological, willing to take their cues from their standard bearer.”

One troubling sign comes from a column by Michael Tomasky in The Daily Beast, suggesting that  “entitlements” need to be on the table with Republicans, even if they’re not the cause of the deficit, because the president needs bargaining chips to get the tax increases on the rich.  So the safety net has to be sacrificed, not because it’s causing budget problems, but to satisfy Republicans – who just got whooped in the election!

Does anybody think President Obama would have been reelected if had told voters he planned to use Social Security and Medicare as bargaining chips?

The president should hit the road, but he should do it in support of the social insurance programs a majority of Americans want unscathed, and against the budget hokum that blames these programs for the deficit.

The president and his team have shown they know how to get the job done when his own job is at stake. Now it’s time for them to use their prowess to protect the safety net from the vultures that are circling it.

Call the president today and ask him if he’s got our backs.

 

The Battle for Obama's Soul

We know which Barack Obama won reelection Tuesday night.

The question is: which one woke up and went to work Wednesday morning?

Was it the passive Obama who, after winning a stirring, historic victory in 2008, allowed the insurgent tea party to inaccurately redefine his affordable health care plan as a government takeover?

Was it the conciliatory Obama who chose not to use his considerable rhetorical skills to rally the country against intransigent Republicans and Wall Street CEOs who opposed even the most modest attempts to use government to rein in Wall Street excess?

Was it the detached Obama of the first presidential debate October 3 who bizarrely said that he and the Republican candidate Mitt Romney agreed in their approach to Social Security?

Or was it the other Obama, the one whose 2012 campaign struck early and often against Mitt Romney, branding him as an out of touch plutocrat, while defining the president as the staunch defender of the threatened middle class?
As Mark Weisbrot of the Center For Economic and Polcy Research points out, Obama and his team carefully shaped a populist message for the 2012 campaign that was much more specific than the 2008 message of hope and change, and it was tailored specifically to win blue-collar votes in the swing states that decided the election.

Will the president continue to embrace that message or abandon it now that he’s won the election?

Which is just another way of saying that the fight for President Obama’s soul continues.

The current battlefield is the drama over the $7 trillion fiscal cliff and the “grand bargain.” As portrayed in the media, if Congress and the president can’t come up with a combination of budget cuts and revenue to cut the budget, Congress has agreed to impose a set of draconian budget cuts.

At the heart of the dispute is the continuation of the Bush cuts and the payroll tax holiday, the extension of unemployment benefits, and a variety of defense and other cuts. Some congressional leaders from both parties are pushing for a “grand bargain” to avoid the cliff – and they want to include cuts to Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare.

President Obama may have wavered on protecting Social Security, but Harry Reid, the Democratic Senate majority leader and 28 other senators have not. They’ve signed a pledge to avoid cuts to Social Security as part of any deficit reduction package.

Which makes complete sense since Social Security doesn’t add a single dime to the deficit.

Have your senators signed the pledge? If they have, call them and thank them, and suggest they add Medicare and Medicaid. If they haven’t, urge them to sign. The more senators that sign the pledge, the better it will be for our president’s soul.

 

 

How Ryan's real math adds up

OK, so Paul Ryan’s budget numbers don’t add up.

But there’s another critical bit of arithmetic that has been working just fine for him, though you won’t read anything about it in the lengthy New York Times magazine profile now available on the newspaper’s web site.

Ryan is portrayed as the Miller Lite-sipping, regular guy NFL-watching, ribs-chomping, charmingly wonky, politically courageous future of the Republican Party.

Give me a break.

What the New York Times did not find newsworthy or illuminating is Ryan’s own money trail.

When you pull back the curtain on the slickly constructed down-home image, a starkly different picture emerges. Ryan, it turns out, is a magnet for Wall Street and hedge fund campaign cash.

As Politico and the Wall Street Journal have reported, members of the financial and insurance industries have been Ryan’s key backers since he first?? ran for reelection?? in 2000. The country’s commercial banks’ PACs and employees spent nearly $60,000 on his campaign.  His top contributor that year was Bank One, which was later gobbled up by JP Morgan Chase.
In 2002, the National Association of Insurance and Financial Advisors contributed $10,000 to Ryan – the maximum allowed by law. He also formed his own PAC that year, with the help of supporters from Goldman-Sachs and the Securities Investment Association.

The bankers’ and hedge funds’ generosity has continued – among his top recent contributors is billionaire Chicago-based hedge fund operator Ken Griffin, of Citadel Investment Group, who gave Ryan $5,000. Griffin has also contributed $150,000 to Restore Our Future, a super PAC that supports Mitt Romney, and another $800,000 to the Karl Rove super PAC, American Crossroads.

Over the years, as Ryan rose to head the House Budget Committee, Politico reports that he became one of the top fundraisers in the House, and he has shared his largesse with other Republican candidates.

Another of Ryan’s top financial boosters is Paul Singer, who runs Eliot Financial hedge fund. Ryan paid Singer back when he was one of only 32 Republicans to vote for the auto bailout, a vote that angered Ryan’s fans in the Tea Party. But the bailout boosted Ally Financial; the financial arm of General Motors – in which Singer’s hedge fund had a major stake, the Nation reports.

Hedge funds, banks and insurance companies groups stand to profit handsomely from Ryan’s scheme to privatize Social Security as well as Ryan’s continuing austerity blitzkrieg and plan to strip government of its regulatory power.

Seen from the perspective of his successful fundraising, Ryan isn’t a politician courageously pursuing unpopular policies to dismantle the New Deal and subsequent social programs (like turning Medicare into a voucher program); Ryan is actually acting as a faithful servant of the Wall Street bankers and hedge-fund money men who insist that the federal government’s budget be balanced – as long as it doesn’t cost them anything.

Ryan is also serving his corporate masters when he spreads collective amnesia about the causes of the 2008 financial crisis, preaching the same gospel of deregulation that got the country into the mess we’re in. But Ryan wants you to believe he’s one of us because he digs ribs and roots for the Packers.

The man who would be vice president embodies a pretty twisted definition of political courage – protecting Wall Street while crushing the economic security of the little people.

 

 

 

In austerity fight, deceptions have just begun

Only time will tell how much of a boost Republican challenger Mitt Romney will get from his debate win over President Obama.

The president seemed flatfooted and unprepared to respond to Romney’s shift toward the center, even though Romney’s campaign had suggested that’s exactly what they would do  - use the Etch-a-Sketch to pivot away from the extreme right toward a more moderate stance during the general election campaign.

The debate felt like a replay of the scenario that has played out so often over the past four years: aggressive Republicans concealing their real motives and putting passive Democrats on the defensive.

Romney was acting every bit the CEO in charge, telling the customers what he thought they wanted to hear to make the sale; in this case, that his deficit reduction scheme wouldn’t favor the wealthy and damage the middle-class.

The contrast between CEO Romney talking to voters (customers) and CEO Romney talking to his big contributors (his board of directors) at a private fundraiser in Boca Raton, Fla. in May couldn’t have been starker. In what he thought were private remarks that have now blown up, Romney, you recall, dismissed the 47 percent of the country that supports Obama as self-pitying moochers who need to be taken care by the government.

We know that all politicians say one thing in public and another in private.  That’s not a shock. But what’s striking is just how much contempt CEO Romney expressed for nearly half the voters when he was talking to the people who will hold real power in his administration: his board of directors.

Most CEOs wouldn’t let such feelings slip, even in private. But just as Romney told the Denver audience what he thought it wanted to hear at the debate, so too he was telling his contributors what he thought would please them.

Because make no mistake, plenty of the big money is preparing to work with whoever gets elected in November to launch a major offensive against Social Security and Medicare as well as to end tax breaks that favor the middle class, such as the mortgage interest tax break, under the guise of backing a new grand bargain to balance the budget.

For example, billionaire hedge fund executive Pete Peterson, who has also spent $458 million of his own money to push an austerity agenda, is now backing a bipartisan group known as Campaign to Fix the Debt. Ryan Grim at Huffington Post reports that the initiative has raised $30 million so far, including $5 million from a single unnamed donor.

The operation has hired 25 to 30 staffers, with plans to double, Grim reports. Along with a paid-media campaign, aims to influence press coverage in 40 states with locally focused teams.

This “bipartisan” initiative is just the latest attempt by Wall Street and its allies to pass the costs of the government deficits created by the financial crisis on to the middle class and those who can least afford it.  Though President Obama has said he won’t let these programs be cut in a way that hurts the most vulnerable, to keep that promise he’ll have to grow backbone that was missing Monday night – and through much of his first term.

 

Paul Ryan's battle for billionaires

Thanks to the Republican vice-presidential candidate, Paul Ryan, we’re going to be saved from a negative campaign. Now we’ll be elevated by a campaign about Big Ideas.

At least that’s the latest tripe being peddled by the Big Media, which has spent a lot of time drooling over the insane Ryan budget plan House Republicans passed before it died, only to be joyfully revived by Democrats who sought to pin in to the chests of their Republican opponents in Congressional races, then revived again by a befuddled Mitt Romney, who seems to want to cling to it (for his base) and distance himself from it (for everybody else).

According to the media, Ryan is a cheerful wonk who is the only one brave and bold enough to propose a plan to reduce the federal deficit. Never mind that the numbers don’t add up, or that his budget scheme involves a massive future reductions not only of Medicare but all government services except defense spending.

Ryan has become a top expert at capitalizing on legitimate skepticism about government and economic anxiety in the wake of the 2008 bailout and grafting those feelings on to the austerity agenda of the 1 percent – crushing all government regulation, reducing popular government services like parks and health care for the elderly, and privatizing Social Security while placing the burden of the nation’s fiscal problems on those least able to afford it and keeping tax rates low for the wealthiest Americans.

For our media elite, these are what pass for serious ideas. There’s little scrutiny beyond reporting Ryan’s rhetoric, in which he insists he’s out to save Medicare and merely facing a fiscal reality that others are afraid to confront.

You don’t have to dig very deep to find Ryan’s real motives, and who the winners will be if he wins his fight.

As usual in contemporary politics, the reality can be found in the money that has fueled Ryan’s rise. Among his top campaign contributors: Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, UBS bank and Wells-Fargo, along with corporate powerhouses like AT&T, Blue Cross-Blue Shield and Northwestern Mutual. He’s been closely associated with the billionaire Koch Brothers Americans For Prosperity.

Once you look into Ryan’s actual record, he looks a lot more like your garden-variety congressional hypocrite: preaching the free-market gospel while he votes for the 2008 no-questions-asked bank bailout, trashing the Obama administration stimulus package while making sure that his congressional district got its share of the spoils.

If the media were doing its job, Ryan would be dismissed for the craven con artist that he is, not lionized. Mitt Romney claims that he chose Ryan to balance out his own inexperience in Washington. But Ryan’s efforts to push through his budget scheme have failed miserably – except at making him a media darling.

If the media were doing its job, the headlines would be describing Ryan’s real, and embarrassingly modest, legislative record since he was elected to Congress in 1998. His first successful piece of legislation renamed his local post office in Janesville, Wisconsin for longtime Wisconsin Democratic congressman and former defense secretary Les Aspin in 2000. His other legislative achievement has been a bill to amend the IRS code to modify the taxation of arrow components. (Ryan uses bows and arrows for sport.)

Along with other fellow Republicans, he signed on to the Bush tax cuts, a partial-birth abortion ban and several efforts to increase sanctions against Iran.

Aside from that, he’s co-sponsored eight pieces of legislation issuing commemorative coins and five resolutions honoring Ronald Reagan.

There must have been some tough choices involved. Just who exactly should get a commemorative coin in their honor? Not just anybody, and you’re bound to make somebody mad. But it’s not exactly a profile of courage. How much courage does it take to do the bidding of the CEOs who keep you in office, against the retirees and the poor who can’t afford fat contributions and lobbyists?

 

 

 

 

 

Government of Honeywell, By Honeywell, For Honeywell

 

Of all the corporate big shots offering the rest of us stern lectures about the sacrifices we’re going to have to make, is there any more infuriating than Honeywell’s CEO’s, David Cote?

Cote, who was paid $20 million last year, has been a particularly outspoken member of President Obama’s deficit commission, with a special kind of shameless gall to be able, with a straight face, to warn the rest of us that we will have to get by with less retirement and health care if the country is going to deal with its deficit.

I’d like to propose a new rule: before the president hands somebody like Cote [pronounced Ko-tay] a billion-dollar megaphone, that person and his company should demonstrate that they are following generally accepted rules of good citizenship.

In the case of Honeywell, the company makes the rules it has to live by. And why shouldn’t it? One of the largest contractors to the federal contractors, it’s also one of the heaviest hitters when it comes to lobbying, spending $6.5 million last year. Among manufacturing firms, only General Electric spent more.

But when it comes to political contributions, Honeywell far outstrips GE, with $2.3 million spent in the 2009-2010 election cycle compared to GE’s $1.4 million.

And Honeywell doesn’t just rely on high-paid lobbyists, when the bailout faced a skeptical public in 2008, Cote (who sits on the board of J.P. Morgan Chase) wrote to his employees to suggest they get out and support the bailout.

But in every set of rules that the government sets  related to Honeywell, those millions spent influencing the government turn out to be very solid investments.

For example, taxes. Cote’s Honeywell doesn’t pay any, according to the Citizens for Tax Justice.

It’s all perfectly legal in the rigged world of the U.S. tax code, where corporations like Honeywell use the political access that only money can buy to write the rules they have to live by.

How rigged is the U.S. tax code?

Well, for example, look at the plight of homeowners who lose their home to foreclosure. Even after those poor saps lose their homes, if the lender forgives some of the mortgage debt because the house sells for less than the homeowner owed, the IRS could still come after them.

I know, I know, those homeowners should have had the foresight to hire more lobbyists and increase their contributions to political campaigns.

Taxes are hardly the only place where Honeywell falls short on the standards of good citizenship.

Honeywell has major contracts in Iran, and despite U.S. sanctions against that country, the company has taken a somewhat relaxed view toward compliance, agreeing that it wouldn’t take on any new work in Iran while it closes out its current work.

Because you wouldn’t want sanctions to be too disruptive to Honeywell’s ability to make profits.

Back home in the U.S., Cotes’ Honeywell has been especially good at squeezing sacrifices from other people, like its workers and the communities who live near its facilities.

Dirt Diggers Digest has compiled a useful summary of Honeywell’s actions at the Illinois plant that is the sole facility in the country where uranium ore is converted into the uranium hexafluoride gas used in the production of both nuclear power and nuclear weapons, a risky process using highly toxic materials.

Last year workers at the plant balked when the company sought to eliminate retiree health benefits, reduce pensions for new hires, cap severance pay and contract out maintenance. So Honeywell locked them out and brought in replacement workers.

After an explosion at the plant, Honeywell was cited by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for improperly coaching replacement workers during investigations by federal inspectors, while the Environmental Protection Agency fined the company $11.8 million for illegally storing hazardous waste – only the latest in more than $650 million in fines for misconduct, according to the Project on Government Oversight.

But the federal contracts keep pouring in, because in Honeywell’s world, misconduct is just part of doing business, and doesn’t have real world consequences. And apparently that misconduct doesn’t give David Cote any qualms about telling the rest of us what we need to do.

Do you have candidates for most infuriating corporate bigwig? Let WheresOurMoney.org know.

 

 

 

 

 

Stand Up Against Fear, Mr. President

Dear Mr. President:

I'm glad to see reports that you don’t intend to call for cuts to Social Security, as your hand-picked so-called deficit commission recommended.

But turning over the Social Security debate to Congress and standing back to see what they come up with is not good enough, Mr. President.

It’s time for you to take on those who want to undermine Social Security protections under the guise of concern over the deficit, rather than enable them, as you have been doing by stacking your deficit commission with members who had previously supported cuts to Social Security.

Now it’s time for you to fight back against the fear-mongering propaganda campaign that’s been trying to whip up a phony crisis around Social Security, not to stand on the sidelines, Mr. President.

Yes, it will be a tough fight. The pundits, Republicans, many in your own party and a gang of Wall Street tycoons are lined up against you.

But the good news for you politically, Mr. President, is that a majority of the people in the country are lined up with you, should you choose to lead them in this fight.

This is a fight we can win, Mr. President. It’s good politics and it’s good sense.

Yes, it means you’ll have to go up against some of the bankers you’ve been trying to get cozy with. You’ll have to stand up and speak out against the fear that the Social Security cutters are peddling. But if you choose to lead this fight, you may remember that’s why we elected you.