Steve's Politics Blog

The Real News Network has the interview Black Report: Craziness on Three Continents.  Here is an anti-spoiler alert – the Middle East does not figure in the craziness.

BLACK: Second continent is that President Correa of Ecuador wasn’t available to weigh in on this because he was in Spain dealing with their craziness. So this is the Ibero-Americas conference, in which the prime ministers of Spain and Portugal and the heads of state of Latin American nations get together. And Correa and a number of other of his counterparts tried to convince the Spanish prime minister that the austerity provisions that he’s imposed that have led to Great Depression levels of unemployment were catastrophic disasters.

Here’s the kicker. The prime minister of Spain responded, no, you’re wrong; you don’t understand; we’re following the policies that were so successful in Latin America—austerity. Now, this is hilarious, of course, because, first, he’s telling the Latin Americans they don’t know their own history and he does, and second, of course, the Latin America leaders have so many very strong progressives precisely because they were elected on the promise to fight the Washington consensus, which is the austerity program that was imposed on Latin America and caused so much harm there. So we have an effort by the colonies to try to save the mother country, and instead, the mother country is responding with fictions about the histories of Latin America and telling the Latin American presidents they don’t understand their own histories.

If I didn’t know better, I think I know better, maybe my sister’s claims that the end of the world is coming might be true.

Do you know what this guy is talking about?

I think you should.

Progressive Massachusetts has the article Now What? The long-term work of bending the arc by Harmony Wu.

The article concludes with the following:

Grassroots power is not turned on and off and back on again with a switch, at a moment’s notice. To truly build an effective movement, one that mobilizes true change, it takes long-term organizing, work, relationship-building, and collaboration with others who share our common goals.

• What if getting better government and policies meant not just an every couple-of-years high-intensity short-term election push?
• What if we worked on a slower burn, sustained and over time?

We have power; let’s focus it and put it to use!

This is the very issue that the Elizabeth Warren campaign volunteers in the Brimfield/Southbridge/Sturbridge area are struggling with right now. We are planning to at least meet often to keep the group together for just the reasons cited in Harmony Wu’s piece.

Nation Of Change has the story Hostess Blames Union for Bankruptcy after Tripling CEO’s Pay.

But while headlines have been quick to blame unions for the downfall of the company there’s actually more to the story: While the company was filing for bankruptcy, for the second time, earlier this year, it actually tripled its CEO’s pay, and increased other executives’ compensation by as much as 80 percent.

At the time, creditors warned that the decision signaled an attempt to “sidestep” bankruptcy rules, potentially as a means for trying to keep the executive at a failing company.

The vulture capitalists that took over Hostess must have been reading Mitt Romney’s how to book on being a vulture capitalist.  He used a similar ploy for executives of a firm he took over in order to keep the money out of the hands of the FDIC.  After admitting that they had been snookered, the FDIC had to agree to calling it even after accepting 30 cents on the dollar from Romney’s company for one of the banks the FDIC was rescuing.

If you and I hid funds from the bankruptcy court, we would be in jail without passing go and without collecting $200.  Even though corporations are people, it seems that you cannot put them in jail when they do the same thing other people do to get themselves jailed.

Now that I have been defriended on Facebook by my own relatives, I guess it was time to get off Israel’s case and bust somebody else’s myths.

Senator John Kerry has the post A few quick thoughts on filibuster reform appearing on the BlueMassGroup web site. Here is a small part of what he said:

On the filibuster specifically,  I’ve actually been a broken record about the abuses and the need for reform – because I’ve lived the consequences. It’s worse than people even think – it’s measured not just in the hours wasted on the Senate floor in filibusters mounted just to run out the clock before 98-2 votes, but the real cost is measured in issues that never get to the Senate floor because then we’re told there’s “no time.” It’s an amazingly cynical strategy to create chaos and gridlock and then blame us for not getting things done or working together!

With Elizabeth Warren using social media to get attention for this issue and John Kerry backing her up on it, I think we may finally have an effective Senate team representing Massachusetts again.  I’d hate to see Senator Kerry depart for a position in the Obama administration.

Perhaps this is the real news although not The Real News Network.

I can’t help observing that Susan Lucci puts new meaning to the phrase, “she breathes new life into her role.”

The Huffington Post has the article from Elizabeth Warren – The First Week in January.  It ends with the following call to action:

On the first day of the new session in January, the senators will have a unique opportunity to change the filibuster rule with a majority vote, rather than the normal two-thirds vote. The change can be modest: If someone objects to a bill or a nomination in the United States Senate, they should have to stand on the floor of the chamber and defend their opposition.

I’m joining Senator Jeff Merkley and six other newly elected senators to pledge to lead this reform on Day One, and I hope you’ll be right there with us. Our campaign didn’t end on Election Day — and I’m counting on you to keep on working each and every day to bring real change for working families. This is the first step.

What can we do to support this effort by Elizabeth Warren?  Perhaps we can start by making this post of hers go viral.  We have to use the power we have which derives from our numbers.  Make sure all the other Senators know how much the public supports this effort.

Truth Out has an op-ed Embrace the Fiscal Cliff  by Simon Johnson, Moyers & Company. The original source of this op-ed is on Bill Moyers’ web site.

In the post-election commentary, you will hear numerous voices – definitely on the right but also on the left – arguing that we could not possibly increase taxes this year or next, as this will push our economy back into recession. Do not believe them – this is just the latest disinformation put out by people who agree with Grover Norquist that the real goal of politics should always and everywhere be to reduce taxes and shrink the size of government. It is exactly such policies that have brought us to our current economic predicament.
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But once he has vetoed Bush cuts, President Obama can immediately propose a new set of tax cuts – the Obama tax cuts – to Congress. These would cut taxes for lower income Americans, for example by lowering payroll taxes (which should also encourage job creation). Would the House Republicans really vote against a tax cut for 100 million Americans?

These new tax cuts should be linked to the state of the economy – for example, they could phase out automatically as employment rises relative to population. This would both help the economy in the short-run and put our budget onto a much more sound footing for the coming decades.

This last paragraph is an excellent example of making policy that adjusts to the economic cycles.  Rather than enshrining permanent economic shifts in government policy into law to solve temporary problems, we enact temporary solutions for temporary problems.

By enacting hard to get rid of tax cuts when they were not needed, George Bush and the Congress at the time created a structural deficit in the budget.  In other words a deficit that will still be there even when the economy was at full employment.  In fact the economy was at full employment when they foolishly enacted permanent tax cuts when temporary tax cuts were not even needed.

There are people who do not seem able to or willing to understand the difference between what George Bush did and what President Obama ought to be doing now.  In a cyclical situation, timing is everything for the right policy.  On the other hand timing is nothing for a policy that is permanently wrong.

I have been getting some denial when I make the reference implied in this cartoon.

I am glad to see that political cartoonist Tom Toles sees the same obvious parallel that I see.

The Real News Network has the interview Is the “Fiscal Cliff” a Fiction?

I have selected some pieces from the transcript:

But I think the important thing is for people everywhere—for Americans, for other people, but particularly people in the United States—to realize that this deficit is not a problem. Once you realize it’s not a problem, then it becomes easier to argue against cuts in it, whether Obama’s for them or anyone else is for them. I mean, there are a lot of people out there on the left or whose hearts are in the right place who really do think it’s a problem if the government is spending a lot more money than it’s taking in. That’s a problem, that we have a debt that’s equal to annual GNP. But it’s not a problem, and people ought to realize it’s not a problem
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The first thing to realize is almost 40 percent of the U.S. Debt is owned by the U.S. Government itself or by state governments. Another 20 percent or so is held by various private pension funds.

So think about that for a moment. The biggest single holder of U.S. debt is the Social Security system. The interest rate goes up. What happens to [incompr.] The Social Security system has more money and is more solvent. I’m not for interest rates going up, but what I’m saying is it’s not—paying this interest does not mean money down a rat hole. It’s not just throwing money away. People hold those assets. And many of the people who hold them are people like you and me—I mean, particularly me, because I’m retired. So those interest payments in part are what fund people’s pensions. And that should be kept in mind when you’re thinking about whether or not the debt is a problem.

The whole interview puts together in one place a lot of the economic principles I have been talking about in various articles on this blog.

Based on the comments on The Real News Network web site, there seem to be two camps. The camp to which I belong, is the one that says “finally an interview that puts many of the economic issues together in one place.” The other camp seems to be, “this guys an idiot and can’t possible know what he is talking about.”

For the second camp, I hark back to Mark Twain’s famous quote, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” Of course the other side would just repeat that quote to me.