Here is an email I received from boldprogressives.org:

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Steven,

BREAKING: Today, in a press conference, President Obama came right out and said it: He’s pushing for benefit cuts in important programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

You and 175,000 others boldly pledged that if Obama actually cuts Medicare/Medicaid benefits, you’ll take your money and volunteering elsewhere in 2012. 

Click here to stand up for Social Security by adding it to your pledge.

Then, help us reach our new goal of 200,000 people by sharing the pledge:

On Facebook: Click here.

On Twitter: PLEDGE: If @BarackObama cuts Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid benefits, no money from me in 2012

For those of us who worked tirelessly to elect Obama in 2008, here are the 3 most depressing quotes from today’s press conference: 

1) “We’re going to have a sales job. This is not pleasant. It is hard to persuade people to do hard stuff that entails trimming benefits and increasing revenues.”

Significance: This is the first time Obama admitted he is pushing “benefit” cuts that would hurt our grandparents, kids, and the disabled — not just “savings” like negotiating lower drug prices. 

2) “I want to be crystal clear — nobody has talked about increasing taxes now.  Nobody has talked about increases — increasing taxes next year.”

Significance: Polling shows that by 4 to 1, Americans want taxes increased on the rich. The “millionaires tax” proposed by House progressives would raise $1 trillion — helping to take benefit cuts off the table. By his own admission, Obama is not even asking for this!

3) “With respect to Social Security, Social Security is not the source of our deficit problems….the reason to include that potentially in this package is if you’re going to take a bunch of tough votes, you might as well do it now, as opposed to trying to muster up the political will to get something done further down in the future.” 

Significance: Seriously??? Why is a Democratic president going out of his way to help Republicans cut Social Security??? That’s just wrong.

Please add Social Security to the list of programs you pledge to defend. Click here.

Then, please pass this email to others. Thanks for being a bold progressive.

— Adam Green, Stephanie Taylor, Michael Snook, Forrest Brown, and the PCCC team

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Named The Nation’s “Most Valuable Online Activism of 2010″—thanks to you. Help us continue our effective, independent progressive activism. Chip in $3 here.

Paid for by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee PAC (www.BoldProgressives.org) and not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. Contributions to the PCCC are not deductible as charitable contributions for federal income tax purposes.

Well, I just heard President Obama’s press conference on the negotiations about debt and deficit control.

I can forget my post Obama Plays The Republicans Like A Fiddle. That was pretty short lived. It was too much to expect that the President was any kind of a musician.

He summed up the press conference with abysmal closing remarks.  The point is not, as he claimed,  to solve our long term fiscal problems so that we can get back to the issue of jobs.  The point is to solve our long term fiscal problems in a way that will be supportive of economic growth – right now and in the future.

As many people in my business career liked to point out, long term solutions are of no value if you can’t make it through tomorrow.  There has to be a long term for long term plans to be of any value.

Obama talked about all the things he has tried to do to get job growth in this country.  He seems to have run out of ideas once he gets passed that point. He states that he has looked at the whole menu of steps that can be taken, but he seems to have missed the page about raising taxes on the wealthy as one of those steps.  He still doesn’t seem to understand that raising the taxes on high income earners is absolutely essential to getting job growth in this country. He does not see that any alternative plan takes more money out of the hands of the middle class and shifts it to the wealthy.

He missed countless opportunities in his press conference to make the point.  This is probably the very strongest point he can make, and yet he fails every time to make it.  Skewed income distribution is the largest problem this country is facing.  It is larger than health care costs.   It is larger than long term funding of Medicare.  It is certainly a larger issue than the fiscal health of Social Security 75 years from now.

If we don’t solve the issue of skewed income distribution in this country, there won’t be a country like the USA in this location in the world in 75 years.

P.S. I consider a totally flat distribution of income to be skewed, too.  It may be hard to define a “proper” income distribution, but that doesn’t mean we can’t recognize a bad distribution when we see one.

It’s like tuning in a radio station on your old dial radio, if anyone remembers one of those.  I don’t know exactly on the dial where I will get the best reception of a particular station.  I have an indication of a pretty likely spot to start my search. As I turn the dial in the vicinity of that starting point it becomes more and more obvious where the best point is.

This one, Smoke Exposure Linked to Learning Disorders, is for my own memory bank.

An increased risk of neurobehavioral disorders among children should be added to the list of the adverse effects of secondhand smoke, according to the results of a nationwide telephone survey.

Given all I have said against Obama’s great capitulation, I hold out one hope that I almost dare not speak.  Obama cannot say it, but who will care if i do?

Maybe Obama is playing the Republicans like a fiddle.

I took heart by reading the story tonight White House Debt Talks Make Little Progress on the ABC web site of all places.

I’ll give you a few quotes and try to explain why they might be hopeful signs.

Monday morning the president will hold a news conference on the matter, making his case to the American people about why tax rates for wealthier Americans and corporations need to be raised as part of a deficit reduction package of at least $4 trillion over the next decade.

Maybe he really does understand the Robert Reich “Aftershock …” hypothesis.  Maybe he is about to explain it to the nation just as I have been repeatedly touting it on this blog.

A Democratic aide familiar with the process said that Boehner “put on the table letting the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy expire and banking the revenue and then he bailed. The speaker couldn’t take the heat from the Republican caucus.”

Maybe the speaker really knows it , too, and he is quaking in his boots.  Did I see a tear in his eye?

A senior aide to the speaker said Boehner told the leaders that he still “believes a package based on the work of the Biden group is the most viable option at this time for moving forward.”

These are the talks that Eric Cantor walked out on.  According to Cantor, he and the Speaker are on the same page.  Looks like the Speaker is straying from the reservation.  Maybe he sees how he is about to be rolled and wants to go back to the previous offer.  Too late, sucker!!

Sources said that during the meeting Obama pointed out that Republicans appeared to be walking away from reducing the deficit and Boehner told him he can’t go for the big deal because there is not time to do it and no path to gain enough support to pass it through the House.

Maybe we’ve got one team playing “Good cop, bad cop” against another team who is using the same tactic.  I am not sure I have ever seen the game played where both sides are using this tactic.

“Democrats continue to put entitlement reform on the table, but Republicans are still refusing to take yes for an answer because of their ideological adherence on [tax] revenues,” the aide said.

Has Obama got the Republicans on the run?  Could it be that Obama is more Machiavellian than we ever dreamed.  Maybe putting the entitlements on the table was all a ploy.  It was so devious that he couldn’t even let his allies know?  He was the good cop on the Democrats side and Pelosi and Reid played bad cop?

One can only hope.  14th Amendment here we come.  Maybe Obama was just kidding when he said that path was off the table so that he could reel them in really good.

July 11, 2020 10:00 AM

It just occurred to me that using his 14th Amendment powers might not help the country as much as I had hoped.

See Obama, GOP back to where they started: The debt ceiling for this quote from the Secretary of the Treasury.

Now, on August 2nd, if Congress hasn’t acted, we’re left with the cash we have and the cash we’re going to take in. And every week, starting the week of August 2nd, we have to go out and finance roughly $100 billion in maturing obligations of the government.

If you were a bond investor, how would you feel about the risk of buying bonds that were created under a legal doctrine that was sure to be challenged all the way to the Supreme Court?

After adding the above postscript, I read the OpEd piece, Don’t wave Constitution in debt’s face in The Boston Globe.

It makes the same point as my postscript above.  It also gives some background to the 14th Amendment clause:

“(t)he validity of the public debt of the United States . . . shall not be questioned,’’

The author of the OpEd piece, Juliette Kayyem, suggests a different way to use the 14th Amendment language.

Here is a video that I was shown by Rebuild the Dream.

Next week—at more than 1,400 American Dream house meetings—people will gather in living rooms to sort through the top ideas and discuss what the American Dream is really all about.

The article Actor Hugh Grant confronts News of the World editor on air on rawstory.com gave me access to this video.

I do presume that everyone knows that Faux Noise comes from the same media empire as News of the World.

Well the actual Boston Globe story was headlined Jarring slowdown in hiring raises concern.  The story opened with:

Hiring ground to a halt last month, and the nation’s unemployment rate rose to its highest level this year, adding to the deep uncertainty about the pace of the nation’s economic recovery.

I posted the following comment (slightly edited here):

This article could just as well have been headlined “Layoffs Of Government Workers Causes Rise in Unemployment”.

The article does not mention that 57,000 jobs were created in the private sector. The reader has to figure that out by adding the 18,000 net jobs created and the 39,000 jobs cut from state and local governments mentioned by Alan Clayton-Mathews. Readers of this story have to derive the 57,000 private jobs created that are mentioned explicitly by other news media. Clayton-Matthews mentions that the cuts of government workers also lowers the figures for private employment if you count contractors and the like.

If the government jobs had not been lost, we would have had a rise of 55,000 jobs or maybe more (taking into account Clayton-Matthews statement.).

Boehner wonders where the jobs are when he knows the policies he favors are responsible for the state and local government layoffs.

If the public is to decide which is the best economic policy to follow – stimulus or deficit cutting – the news media providing the public knowledge must be smart enough to know how to give us all the data.

Could someone report to me the first occurrence of a news story in the main stream media that tilts the story in the direction I have suggested?  Is it a coincidence that every major media outlet is playing this story in exactly the same way?

In the article GOP hardens resolve on debt talks after poor jobs report there is a quote from House Speaker John Boehner.

“Where are the jobs?” House Speaker John Boehner asked at a press conference today after the Labor Department reported that the the unemployment rate rose to 9.2 percent in June. The economy generated just 18,000 net new jobs last month, making it the slowest month for job creation in nine months.

He is great at misleadingly citing statistics to deflect the blame from himself and try to put it on Obama.

I had already done some other reading,  Stocks Fall 1% on Weak Jobs Data, before coming across Boehner’s misleading remarks.

The U.S. economy only added 18,000 jobs in June after gaining 25,000 jobs in May, according to the Labor Department’s report, which was well below the increase of 80,000 that the market had been expecting. The private sector added 57,000 payrolls, missing projected additions of 110,000, according to Briefing.com.

If the total added was 18,000, but the additions from the private sector was 57,000, then one would have to assume that 39,000 jobs were cut from the public sector.  One might also assume that the number of private sector jobs created would have been higher if we had not lost the consumer spending of the 39,000 people who lost their government jobs.  Had it not been for Republican obstructionism, the job numbers for this month could have been above 57,000 instead of the net 18,000 we got.  If the private sector had hit the target of 110,000 mentioned in the article and the government had not laid of 39,000, the job gains would have been 110,000.  Thanks, Republicans, you have been doing an excellent job of holding back the recovery.  You Republicans cut off as much as 90% of the job growth and then blame Obama.  Outrageous!!!

Indeed if you follow one of the links in the above article, you come to June Jobs Increase Falls Short.

However, Canally noted that the report was a “half empty, half full” picture. Although jobs in state and local governments dropped, retail and leisure sectors saw strong gains, Canally explained. He also added that the drop in manufacturing hours worked might be a bit “fluky” given that ISM’s reading on manufacturing was much better last week.

Why do I say that Boehner is misleading?  The cutback of jobs in the public sector is exactly what Boehner wants to happen.  He does not want the Federal government to keep supporting state budgets which would have prevented these layoffs.  In having to balance their budgets, and with their refusal to raise taxes on the wealthy, the states have had to layoff workers.  Thus the absence of net job creation comes exactly from the type of policies Boehner is proposing and not from the Obama policies that Boehner rejects.

Compare my analysis of the job numbers above with the above video of President Obama’s response today to those numbers. What a weak response he has made, when a strong one was needed. At about 1:50 into the video he did mention state and local budget cuts, and that was it for that topic. The President just does not get it, and I don’t think he ever will.

It is apparent to me that this President has just run out of steam and fight.

I saw a a comment on one of the boards that I read that really nails the issue. Our problem when we elected Obama was that we hired a mediator when we needed an advocate. President Obama is not the right person at the right time. We need a strong challenger in the Democratic presidential primary in 2012. This challenger needs to be an extremely strong advocate. If she or he foolishly talks about getting cooperation from the Republicans, we need to write that candidate off immediately.

Earlier this evening I was watching BBC news. They started talking about the job numbers and focused on the 18,000 net jobs lost. They did not dig into the composition of those number to give us any insight. At least they didn’t before I turned them off in disgust.

Later I was watching NBC news where there was a promise that they would dig in. When they brought forth Maria Bartiromo to comment, I could just not stand it anymore. It was better to watch the movie on TCM about the development of the British Spitfire fighter plane before World War II than it was to continue to watch the idiocy that passes for news (at least in this country and in Britain.)

With reports that President Obama has put cuts to Social Security and Medicare on the bargaining table just to get concessions on some tax loopholes, it has become a time for action.

I have commented on one of Paul Krugman’s articles The Obama-Keynes Mystery that leading like-minded economists must demand an emergency meeting with the president.

There is wonderment in the community of economists on how President Obama can be going down the economic path he is choosing in the face of all the evidence against taking that path.  They wonder if he even understand Keynes’ insights on how the economy works on a national and international scale.

First, the economic delegation must insist that the President explain his economic philosophy.  They need to ask pointed questions.  Does the President think there can be a self-sustaining recovery with the current way wealth is concentrated in the hands of the few?  Does he really believe that the only way to stimulate job growth is by giving incentives to the wealthy and corporations despite the fact that there is insufficient demand for the goods that these investments would produce?  Does he have any understanding of why there is unlikely to be enough demand even if he managed to get the country back to work?  In this case, as soon as the government scales back it stimulus, the economy will fall back into recession.  We cannot afford a never ending government stimulus package.  He needs to get the job done as efficiently as possible, as lastingly as possible, and then withdraw from government stimulus.  Just as in war, decisive victory is not accomplished by starting with too few resources and slowly building up.

The President needs to explain his understanding devoid of political considerations.  If they can get him to first understand how the economy works, then they can get down to figuring out how to make fixing the economy happen, given the present state of politics.

Any of President Obama’s current supporters or people who think they might support his re-election in 2012 need to get behind this call for an intervention.  This is the only way we will save his presidency for him.  Without this intervention, it makes no difference how loyal you are to Obama, he has a serious chance of being thrown out of office if his budget compromise turns out to be as horrible as we are beginning to suspect.

In his bid to become President, his campaign wisely figured out the only strategy that could lead to victory and then they figured out the tactics to make it happen.  They realized there were less bold strategies, but they new they would not lead to success. Where is that version of Obama now?