Obama Stands Up To Cantormania

Ken and I went to elementary school together in Brooklyn. We often get smitten with the same magazine covers

Obama's never going to be the kind of president I want. I knew that-- from carefully studying his uncomfortably corporatist record in the Senate-- when I voted for him in 2008. And, despite pressure, Blue America never endorsed him or raised a dime for his campaign, not in 2008 and, certainly not during this campaign. Obama was in Asheville, North Carolina yesterday, a Democratic stronghold and he was talking smack about conservatives. It would have been a great opportunity-- one he would never in a trillion years consider-- to show another side of bipartisanship. He could have talked about how conservative Republican Patrick McHenry (who just had Asheville put into his district) and how conservative Blue Dog Democrat Health Shuler (the current Representative for that city) have been obstructing his plans for a better America. Shuler, like McHenry, is a corporate whore, who takes his campaign cash and his walking orders from Wall Street. The Obama of my long-dead dreams would have endorsed progressive Democrat and Asheville City Councilman Cecil Bothwell. Sure, I know... patently absurd. How many Democratic presidents ever campaigned against conservatives in their own party? Do you know? You might be surprised at the answer.

That said, a "C' or a "D" is always better than a flat out "F," which would be a good description of the policies of Romney, Perry, Gingrich or any of the minor vanity candidates running for the Republican nomination. As Steve Benen pointed out yesterday, Obama is smart to offer to put his jobs program up against the Republican Party's "jobs" program as often as possible.

Here's some of the back-and-forth from the President's appearance yesterday in Asheville:

THE PRESIDENT:  We should be talking about jobs.  When you hear what’s going on out in the country, when you take the time to listen, you understand that a lot of folks are hurting out there.  Too many people are looking for work.  Too many families are looking for that sense of security that’s been slipping away for the past decade, now.
 
Here in North Carolina, you’ve got thousands of construction workers who lost their jobs when the housing bubble  burst.  Some of those construction workers are here today.  They’ve got experience.  They’ve got skills.  All they want is to be back on the job site doing what they do best.  (Applause.)
 
And there is plenty of work to go around.  In this airport right here in Asheville, you’ve got a runway that needs to be widened and repaired.  You’ve got a taxiway that’s in the wrong spot –- which means that planes sometimes get too close together.  So we could be doing some work right here at the Asheville Airport that would help boost tourism, help to boost the economy here, put people to work right now.  (Applause.) 
 
But it’s not just here in Asheville.  All across the state, you’ve got highways that need to be built.  You’ve got bridges that need to be fixed.  You’ve got schools that need to be modernized.  (Applause.)  And that’s what America used to do best.  We used to build things -- built the Transcontinental Railroad; built the Golden Gate Bridge; the Hoover Dam; the Grand Central Station.  There’s no reason why we should sit here and watch the best highways and the newest airports being built in China.  We should be building them right here in the United States of America.  (Applause.)  Right here in North Carolina.  (Applause.)
 
Now, our problems were a long time in the making–- we’re not going to solve them overnight.  But there are things we can do right now to put people back to work-- right now.  There are things we should do right now to give the economy the jolt that it needs.  So that’s why I sent Congress the American Jobs Act.  (Applause.) 
 
AUDIENCE:  Thank you!
 
THE PRESIDENT:  Keep in mind-- keep in mind, Asheville, this is the kind of bill containing the kinds of proposals that in the past have received support from Democrats and Republicans.  It’s completely paid for-- by asking our wealthiest citizens, folks making more than a million dollars a year, to pay their fair share.  (Applause.) 
 
Independent economists-- not my economists, but independent economists-- have said this jobs bill would create nearly 2 million jobs.  That’s not my opinion.  It’s not the opinion of folks who work for me.  It’s the opinion of people who evaluate these kinds of things for a living.  It says this bill will help put people back to work and give our economy a boost right away.
 
But apparently none of this matters to the Republicans in the Senate-- because last week they got together to block this bill.  They said no to putting teachers and construction workers back on the job.  They said no to rebuilding our roads and our bridges and our airports.  They said no to cutting taxes for middle-class families and small businesses when all they’ve been doing is cutting taxes for the wealthiest Americans.
 
AUDIENCE:  Booo --
 
THE PRESIDENT:  They said no to helping veterans find jobs. 
Essentially, they said no to you-- because it turns out one poll found that 63 percent of Americans support the ideas in this jobs bill.  (Applause.)  So 63 percent of Americans support the jobs bill that I put forward; 100 percent of Republicans in the Senate voted against it.  That doesn’t make any sense, does it?
 
AUDIENCE:  No!
 
THE PRESIDENT:  No, it does not. 
 
Now, it turns out that the Republicans have a plan, too.  I want to be fair.  They call-- they put forward this plan last week.  They called it the “Real American Jobs Act.”  The "real one"-- that’s what they called it-- just in case you were wondering.  (Laughter.)  So let’s take a look at what the Republican American jobs act looks like.  It turns out the Republican plan boils down to a few basic ideas:  They want to gut regulations; they want to let Wall Street do whatever it wants. 
 
AUDIENCE:  Booo --
 
THE PRESIDENT:  They want to drill more.
 
AUDIENCE: Booo --
 
THE PRESIDENT:  And they want to repeal health care reform.
 
AUDIENCE:  Booo --
 
THE PRESIDENT:  That's their jobs plan.
 
So let’s do a little comparison here.  The Republican plan says that what’s been standing in the way between us and full employment are laws that keep companies from polluting as much as they want.  On the other hand, our plan puts teachers, construction workers, firefighters and police officers back on the job.  (Applause.)
 
Their plan says the big problem we have is that we helped to get 30 million Americans health insurance.  They figure we should throw those folks off the health insurance rolls; somehow that's going to help people find jobs.
 
AUDIENCE:  Booo --
 
THE PRESIDENT:  Our plan says we’re better off if every small business and worker in America gets a tax cut, and that's what’s in my jobs bill.  (Applause.)  Their plan says we should go back to the good old days before the financial crisis when Wall Street was writing its own rules.  They want to roll back all the reforms that we’ve put into place. 
 
AUDIENCE:  No!
 
THE PRESIDENT:  Our plan says we need to make it easier for small businesses to grow and hire and push this economy forward.  (Applause.)
 
All right, so you’ve gotten a sense-- you got their plan, and then we got my plan.  My plan says we’re going to put teachers back in the classroom; construction workers back to work rebuilding America, rebuilding our schools-- (applause)-- tax cuts for small businesses; tax cuts for hiring veterans; tax cuts if you give your worker a raise.  (Applause.)  That's my plan.
 
And then you got their plan, which is let’s have dirtier air, dirtier water.
 
AUDIENCE:  Booo --
 
THE PRESIDENT:  Less people with health insurance.
 
AUDIENCE:  Booo -- 
 
THE PRESIDENT:  All right so, so far at least, I feel better about my plan.  (Laughter and applause.)  But let’s admit I’m a little biased.  So remember those independent economists who said our plan would create jobs, maybe as many as almost 2 million jobs, grow the economy by as much as 2 percent?  So one of the same economists that took a look at our plan took a look at the Republican plan, and they said, well, this won’t do much to help the economy in the short term -- it could actually cost us jobs.  We could actually lose jobs with their plan. 
 
So I’ll let you decide which plan is the real American Jobs Act.  (Applause.) 
 
AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Obama's plan!
 
AUDIENCE:  Four more years!  Four more years!
 
THE PRESIDENT:  Look, I appreciate the “four more years,” but right now I’m thinking about the next 13 months.  (Applause.)  Because, yes, we’ve got an election coming up, but that election is a long ways away, and a lot of folks can’t wait.  A lot of folks are living paycheck to paycheck.  A lot of folks are living week to week.  You’ve got kids right now who’ve lost their teachers because at the local level you ended up having layoffs.  You’ve got bridges right now that are crumbling and deteriorating.  So we don’t have time to wait.  And we’ve got a choice right now-- right now.

And here's the lockstep Republican response with his fatuous defense of the 1%-- a veritable Thomas Burke, if a less eloquent one-- of the day:



Cantor makes a great target for Democrats; he's as repulsive a political figure as you can find without going to someone like Paul Broun, Mean Jean Schmidt or Steve Womack wiping drool off their chins. In his column about the Kvetchocracy Sunday, Krugman never calls out Cantor by name but one has to believe he had him-- or maybe him and Ryan-- in mind when he was writing the column. These are the people for whom Cantor and Ryan (not to mention Rahm Emanuel and Harold Ford) are shilling for:

As the Occupy Wall Street movement continues to grow, the response from the movement’s targets has gradually changed: contemptuous dismissal has been replaced by whining. (A reader of my blog suggests that we start calling our ruling class the “kvetchocracy.”) The modern lords of finance look at the protesters and ask, Don’t they understand what we’ve done for the U.S. economy?

The answer is: yes, many of the protesters do understand what Wall Street and more generally the nation’s economic elite have done for us. And that’s why they’re protesting.

On Saturday The Times reported what people in the financial industry are saying privately about the protests. My favorite quote came from an unnamed money manager who declared, “Financial services are one of the last things we do in this country and do it well. Let’s embrace it.”

This is deeply unfair to American workers, who are good at lots of things, and could be even better if we made adequate investments in education and infrastructure. But to the extent that America has lagged in everything except financial services, shouldn’t the question be why, and whether it’s a trend we want to continue?

For the financialization of America wasn’t dictated by the invisible hand of the market. What caused the financial industry to grow much faster than the rest of the economy starting around 1980 was a series of deliberate policy choices, in particular a process of deregulation that continued right up to the eve of the 2008 crisis.

Not coincidentally, the era of an ever-growing financial industry was also an era of ever-growing inequality of income and wealth. Wall Street made a large direct contribution to economic polarization, because soaring incomes in finance accounted for a significant fraction of the rising share of the top 1 percent (and the top 0.1 percent, which accounts for most of the top 1 percent’s gains) in the nation’s income. More broadly, the same political forces that promoted financial deregulation fostered overall inequality in a variety of ways, undermining organized labor, doing away with the “outrage constraint” that used to limit executive paychecks, and more.

Oh, and taxes on the wealthy were, of course, sharply reduced.

All of this was supposed to be justified by results: the paychecks of the wizards of Wall Street were appropriate, we were told, because of the wonderful things they did. Somehow, however, that wonderfulness failed to trickle down to the rest of the nation-- and that was true even before the crisis. Median family income, adjusted for inflation, grew only about a fifth as much between 1980 and 2007 as it did in the generation following World War II, even though the postwar economy was marked both by strict financial regulation and by much higher tax rates on the wealthy than anything currently under political discussion.

Then came the crisis, which proved that all those claims about how modern finance had reduced risk and made the system more stable were utter nonsense. Government bailouts were all that saved us from a financial meltdown as bad as or worse than the one that caused the Great Depression.

And what about the current situation? Wall Street pay has rebounded even as ordinary workers continue to suffer from high unemployment and falling real wages. Yet it’s harder than ever to see what, if anything, financiers are doing to earn that money.

Why, then, does Wall Street expect anyone to take its whining seriously? That money manager claiming that finance is the only thing America does well also complained that New York’s two Democratic senators aren’t on his side, declaring that “They need to understand who their constituency is.” Actually, they surely know very well who their constituency is-- and even in New York, 16 out of 17 workers are employed by nonfinancial industries.

But he wasn’t really talking about voters, of course. He was talking about the one thing Wall Street still has plenty of thanks to those bailouts, despite its total loss of credibility: money.

Money talks in American politics, and what the financial industry’s money has been saying lately is that it will punish any politician who dares to criticize that industry’s behavior, no matter how gently-- as evidenced by the way Wall Street money has now abandoned President Obama in favor of Mitt Romney. And this explains the industry’s shock over recent events.

You see, until a few weeks ago it seemed as if Wall Street had effectively bribed and bullied our political system into forgetting about that whole drawing lavish paychecks while destroying the world economy thing. Then, all of a sudden, some people insisted on bringing the subject up again.

And their outrage has found resonance with millions of Americans. No wonder Wall Street is whining.

The 1% know they can count on Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor, Rahm Emanuel and Harold Ford, the entire Republican Party and at least half the Democrats to work with all their might to save them from the 99%. And no matter how determined he may have sounded in Asheville yesterday, Obama is, at best, a conflicted and unsteady champion for the 99%-- as are most of the Democrats. It's why we've endorsed so few incumbents at Blue America and why we're backing just three candidates for the Senate this cycle.


UPDATE: And That Debate... My God

As bad as Obama has been, the seven dwarves are going to win him an undeserved second term. Just look at these two pathetic front runners-- sorry, Herman, but we're dealing with the real word here-- arguing over which one is more of an asshole and Know Nothing: