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?

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.

Bombing Ants in the Sausage Factory

The only aspect of the financial reform legislation that’s truly strong is the level of rhetorical nonsense that both parties have unleashed around it: Democrats and the media exaggerate when they praise it as “the toughest financial overhaul since the Great Depression.”

Not to be outdone, the Republican House minority leader, John Boehner, has weighed in, describing the proposal as a nuclear weapon being used to kill an ant.

Which would make the financial crisis the ant, I guess.

On Tuesday, the nuclear bomb had to go back to the, uh, sausage factory, for some more grinding after Sen. Robert Byrd’s death and the defection of a former Republican reform supporter left the Dems with less than the 60 votes they need to overcome the wall of Republican opposition.

One of the few chinks in that wall had been Sen. Scott Brown. But Brown balked after a $20 billion tax on hedge funds and banks was inserted into the legislation to pay for the costs of modest additional regulation. The Republican senator from Massachusetts said he opposed placing a greater burden on financial institutions and he feared the costs of the tax would be passed on to consumers. So the reform proposal is headed back to the conference committee.

Let’s be clear: overheated and mangled rhetoric aside, the financial reform proposal does nothing to reduce the risk posed by our “too-big to fail” banks or to prevent another crisis. The proposal leaves much of the details to regulators subject to lobbying by the very institutions they’re supposed to oversee.

Now legislators think they’ve found a better bet to fund their reform: you!

According to the New York Times, they’re considering ending the Troubled Asset Relief Program early and diverting about $11 billion in taxpayer funds.

The Times observed this leaves legislators with a couple of awkward choices. “So,” the Times concludes, “the choice becomes a tax that might be passed along to consumers, or a charge directly to American taxpayers.”

Is this the best they can do? I’m increasingly sympathetic to Sen. Russ Feingold, the Wisconsin Democrat who is bucking his president and party, opposing reform because it doesn’t get the job done.

I would suggest that Boehner got it wrong, that the ant[s] are not the financial crisis; they’re the legislators scrambling around serving the banks’ interests when they’re supposed to be serving ours.

But that would give ants a bad name.

Size Matters

The administration that promised change we can believe in and the highest level of transparency in history now delivers “too big to fail” banks - bigger, more complicated and secret than ever.

First, the Obama administration and the Democratic majority in Congress continued policies that assured a number of large financial institutions that taxpayers had bailed out after the financial collapse got even larger and more powerful.

Now the administration and congressional leadership have proposed a scheme that leaves the big banks in place, with a regulatory scheme that provides more questions than answers, with secrecy that treats the banking system like a CIA covert operation.