It’s Not Raining, We’re Being Peed On-- Guest Post From Jonathan Tasini

Unfortunately, this all seems so familiar: lies that lead to death and misery for millions of people. We’ve seen it with the Iraq and Afghanistan wars-- and no one reading this needs a recounting of that travesty.

To me, the domestic economic equivalent of a purely absurd, immoral policy is the obsession over the debt and deficit “crisis.”

There is not “crisis.” Not even a little one.

Yet, here we are, two years down the road of a bi-partisan chorus about the need to “tighten the built,” to cut spending, the eviscerate social programs-- all in the name of some made-up crisis.

Two years ago, I wrote an e-book with the subtle title It’s Not Raining, We’re Being Peed On: The Scam of the Deficit Crisis. On the eve of the president’s State of the Union address, I’m releasing an updated, expanded version of the book (one and only direct promo: you can find out information on buying here).

Because this is pegged to the SOTU, one has to say just this: the president has played a big role in this foolishness so all his promises about focusing on the “middle class” won’t mean much if he doesn’t get off the bandwagon of a policy that is our social Armaggedon. It was the president, after all, who created the debt commission, formerly known as the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform-- the tale of which is part of the revised edition of the book.

Do you like sports? Most people do. So, think about this: let’s say you started a new baseball season with everyone, as usual, looking to capture the ultimate prize: winning the World Series.

You start out the season with the Commissioner of Baseball announcing the following ground rules: everything is on the table, everyone is a part of this race and every option is available to your team.

Except any team that has a stadium within 25 miles of an ocean can’t qualify for the World Series.

And every team with any hint of blue in their uniforms has to spot the other team five runs before the game starts.

And the five richest teams get to use performance-enhancing drugs while everyone else has to eat McDonald’s three times a day (yes, you could argue that eating McDonald’s is like consuming a dangerous drug but let’s save that for another day).

Of course, the outcome would be obvious-- and no one would believe that the playing field was equal, or in tune with the traditional rules, or, certainly, those rules would not leave all options open to all.

The game would be fixed. Unfair. Bogus.

That’s the upshot of the game that went on with the debt Commission.

It was a fixed discussion.

The rules determined the outcome before the Commission ever met.

The rules were fixed because there was a basic agreement among virtually all the Commission members, with the possible exception of one or two people.

It wasn’t a written agreement laying out the rules.

Everyone knew the rules because they shared an unstated worldview.

That worldview was simple: there is a fiscal crisis. And that worldview clearly stated the main reason for the “crisis”: government was “spending too much.”

There would never be a report from the Commission concluding that the vast greed of a very tiny elite had, slowly but surely, butchered the country’s infrastructure-- physical, social, and human.

The Commission would never describe the crisis facing the country as an utter failure of the “free market,” which had, slowly but surely, shifted huge wealth into the hands of a few, putting more of the burden on working Americans to carry the responsibility of paying for a decent society.

The outcome was pre-ordained by the president who created the Commission, a president who accepted the “crisis” rhetoric and, then, tapped two men to lead a Commission who were cut from the same ideological mold: Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles.

Erskine Bowles is a product of the world of the financial elite. He pulls in millions, partly serving as a director on various corporate boards; for his service with Morgan Stanley, one of the world’s leading financial services companies, he pocketed a nifty $345,000 in 2011, another $618,000 to serve on the Board of Facebook and a tidy $285,000 to serve on the board of Norfolk Southern Corporation.

Now, that corporate service isn’t illegal.

But, it does tell us a very important thing: Erskine Bowles is a diehard adherent to the “free market.” He would never fundamentally question the “free market” that has rewarded him so well, with influence, power and money. He would, first and foremost, find fault with government regulation and preach “fiscal prudence."

Alan Simpson’s views on the deficit “crisis” are well-known, as is his fondness for Social Security. It isn’t just his most talked-about description of Social Security as “ a milk cow with 310 million tits.” For years, he has had a mission to turn Social Security money over to Wall Street. In 1994, as a member of Bill Clinton’s Bipartisan Commission on Entitlement and Tax Reform (there is that word “bi-partisan” again-- which was as phony then as it was now: there were not opposing world views on that Commission duking it out), he pushed for benefit cuts and partial privatization.

Aside from the two corporate-minded Commission co-chairs, Bowles and Simpson, the deck was stacked with people who shared that basic worldview.

I tortured myself and watched the video of those hearings. Honestly, it’s not worth your time. But, there was one moment of clarity courtesy of Rep. Jan Schakowsky, who was a hero on the Commission-- the only person who consistently carried the banner for the people.

During the Commission’s fourth public meeting on July 28th, Schakowsky asked the inconvenient question: “To what extent do the proposals that have been made take into account the income inequality in our country?” She continued, citing a study which showed that, “.01 percent, 14,000 American families hold 22.2 percent of the wealth and that the bottom 90 percent of households, that’s over 133 million families, hold just 4 percent of the nation’s wealth… we talk about joint sacrifice but a lot of people have been sacrificing for a long time.”

That inconvenient question momentarily threw off track the witness who was testifying, Maya MacGuineas. And it’s worth pulling out the relatively short exchange-- “relatively” in the vast waste of time eaten up by the Commission-- because MacGuineas is the kind of Trojan horse that makes possible the annihilation of a decent society possible.

Perhaps no one has made more of a career pushing the phony “crisis” than MacGuineas. She comes from the cream of the elite: She completed a Masters in Public Policy from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, which is the assembly line for minting out conventional wisdom-thinking people who, then, seep into every crevice of the policy machine in Washington, D.C.

MacGuineas was no different, doing stints at, of course, the Brookings Institute-- the cathedral of policy wonkery of conventional, uninspired, elite thinking-- and serving on the editorial board of the Washington Post, the media organ of conventional, elite thinking and the megaphone for institutional power.

Her real break came, though, in seizing the debt “crisis” as her own personal crusade. And finding her patron saint, Pete Peterson, to fund a large staff to create her media presence-- the ubiquitous talking head on the topic. (I devote a whole chapter to Peterson, with the subtle title: “The Man and The Lie: Peter Peterson Pees On The People,” in which you’ll be amused by a little back-and-forth between him and yours truly).

MacGuineas cocked her head and looked at Schakowsky: “We have to protect the people who are most vulnerable…by shared sacrifice [it] means everybody has to sort of be involved and there can be no sacred cows but it also can’t be balanced on the backs of people who can’t afford have it happen…”

Schakowsky interrupts: “Which is a slightly different question… because it seems to me that .01 percent versus the 90 percent you might want to make sure we not cut safety net programs. But should we be concerned about this distributional difference in our country?”

MacGuineas: “I don’t see how anybody could not be concerned about it. I think that there are legitimate differences, I suppose, on economic policies on what you do to deal with it... There are short-term re-distributional programs that can help and there’s long-term investment programs that can help and I would say we have to look at both. We certainly have been shortchanging the investment piece of our budget for a long time because we overemphasize consumption spending. We put I believe it’s about 84 cents on the dollar of our budget goes to consumption programs rather than investment programs so of course these income inequality problems are being perpetuated over time… That’s why I think it’s so important also that we do make something like Social Security solvent for 75 years, a long-term solvency of a program that we know so many low income people depend on for retirement income…”

So, several important things happened in that exchange that are so indicative of the political crisis we face.

MacGuineas’ brain activated the “I need to look compassionate” synapse, and expressed perhaps a genuine sentiment that the vulnerable have to be protected. But, that impulse was dispatched in a nanosecond, quickly replaced by the “shared sacrifice” mantra-- a weak attempt at recovering ground seized and shaped by Schakowsky’s observation that “we talk about joint sacrifice but a lot of people have been sacrificing for a long time.”

The mumbo-jumbo about investment versus consumption is entire nonsense-- though because MacGuineas is treated, in that crowd as an oracle, nobody bothered, with the exception of Schakowsky, to point out the nonsensical patter. MacGuineas wants to tell a story, using wonky obfuscation, that somehow inequality in America is, principally, a result of a lack of “investment” in favor of “consumption.”

But, inequality in America is largely a result of the 40-year corporate assault on wages and the robbery of the Treasury by a small elite. Period.

It would be a nice story to sell that we cut Social Security and Medicare for higher income elderly and invested in educating poor children, which would certainly make a small difference in wealth distribution. But, don’t hold your breath on that one. There is not a long history of transferring savings from Social Security to programs for helping poor people. The opponents of Social Security and Medicare tend not to be very friendly to poor peoples’ programs.

It is easy to excoriate people like Alan Simpson, Paul Ryan, and Peter Peterson-- their lifelong dream has been to eviscerate social programs. They see it as a national weakness, a cancer, to spend money on people who they believe don’t deserve it.

But, they could never sell the unraveling of society on their own, particularly to a country that is rapidly changing in complexion-- racially, in the main-- and becoming less hospitable to their harsh Darwinian vision.

No, for that the elite need people like MacGuineas: self-professed “liberals” who act as the standard bearers for abhorrent policy. And that’s the critical insight: how a decent society has been crippled with the help of a whole raft of people who probably pull the Democratic lever on Election Day.

If you want a single hero in this entire scam it was Schakowsky. Though an early backer of Obama, she did not follow orders, or sugarcoat the truth or use her reputation to add a veneer of respectability to the president’s creation. She was the only consistent voice of sanity.

The entire debt and deficit “crisis,” then, presents a moment of truth. What we do about it another matter.

People know something is wrong. They feel the country is coming apart.

We know we have been robbed. People across the political spectrum are right to be angry: they’ve been ripped off. I actually think this phony “crisis” is a thread-- perhaps, thin-- that connects the anger from Occupy Wall Street to the non-racist elements of the Tea Party.

That said, I do not think it is worth spending all our energy pointing fingers at various political leaders-- or waiting for them to save our butts by turning their backs on a “crisis” that they have invested a lot of energy in and political capital to create.

They won’t.

We have to demand from leaders that they take risks-- which may make them unpopular among their foundation funders or rich donors-- and most of them sat by as the crisis unfolded and had virtually no response, other than to offer up proposals to cut “responsibly.”

But, if they won’t take risks, they should get out of the way and resign so others can seize the moment.

As the buy-partisans hatch their secret budget scheme, you be the judge: morons or just plain thugs?

"We can't give up for a year on trying to address this problem. I think we have to do something."

-- the pride of Idaho, GOP Rep. Mike Simpson (file photo)

by Ken

Lordy, lordy, Heath Shuler is concerned about his "legacy"! And guess who has to pay the price. Really, wouldn't think he has "legacy" enough from his NFL "career"? You know, as a quarterback who promised so much and delivered, well, zilch. Apparently as he prepares to rid the U.S. Congress of his sludgelike presence, he wants even more of a legacy as a worse-than-useless bum. So he's put himself at the center of a "bipartisan" encrustation of congressional barnacles who are working furiously, from the depths of their economic cluelessness and ideological thuggery, to devise a budget "reform" plan that will make the 1% even richer and deepen the misery of everyone else. Whatta guy!

Most piquantly of all, the dark princes of deficit hawkery are working in secrecy!

By accident or designed leak, The Hill has breached their impenetrable armor, reporting its findings -- when else? -- at 5:30am Sunday morning! This strikes me as like the traditional "Friday news dump" on steroids. Under cover of darkness on a late-winter Sunday morning?

It's true that the Simpson-Bowles Cat-Food Commission, to which the new "centrist" cabal clearly traces a line of descent, already placed a premium on secrecy. You remember how, faced with the curiosity of (gasp!) a few reporters, they resorted to holding meetings -- meetings of a public commission, ferchrissakes -- in top-secret locations? All the better to produce . . . well, the set of recommendations those avowed "centrists" no doubt had at the ready when they undertook those, er, hearings. (If a supposedly public commission holds its "hearings" in the secret dark depths of the forest, can anything be said to have been actually "heard"?)

Remembering too that the cat-fooders, despite working under its preferred disclosure mode of "none of yer damned business," was unable to sell its recommendations. From which, apparently, the new buy-partisans have learned a lesson: that their predecessors' fatal miscue was allowing their proceedings to be too open.

In case you missed the story, here's the nut of it:

Lawmakers secretly work on bipartisan deficit grand bargain
By Erik Wasson - 03/04/12 05:30 AM ET

A small, bipartisan group of lawmakers in both the House and Senate are secretly drafting deficit grand bargain legislation that cuts entitlements and raises new revenue.

Sources said that the task of actually writing the bills is well underway, but core participants in the regular meetings do not yet know when the bills can be unveiled.

The core House group of roughly 10 negotiators is derived from a larger Gang of 100 lawmakers led by Reps. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) and Health Shuler (D-N.C.), who urged the debt supercommittee to strike a grand bargain last year.

That larger group includes GOP centrists like Rep. Steve LaTourette (R-Ohio), who has said Republicans should abandon their no-new-tax-revenue pledge, as well as Tea Party-backed members like Rep. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.).

The key test in the coming months will be to see whether the core group can get buy-in from many of the 100 members who vaguely support "going big" on the deficit once real cuts and tax increases are identified.

The talks are so sensitive that some members involved do not yet want to be identified.

Shuler, who is retiring this year, is keen to establish a legacy as a deficit cutter before leaving Congress and he is involved in the drafting effort.

His efforts have the strong support of House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), who is actively meeting with individual Democrats to try to get them on board with finding a compromise that stabilizes the national debt. [Way to go, Steny! We'd expect nothing less of you! -- Ed.]

The House members are working in tandem with Senate negotiators who are looking to turn the outline produced by the Senate's Gang of Six into legislative language.

The goal of both groups is the same: make sure the debt is not growing bigger than the size of the economy. . . .

At this point we get a jolting reminder that we're dealing with people who have spent their lives avoiding learning anything about economics, in particular about how government debt works, and how the programs they've obviously got in their gunsights (the usual despisèd trio of Medicare, Medicaid, and the real prize, Social Security) are funded and work: "The Obama 2013 budget does stabilize the debt in the latter half of the decade, but since it does not cut entitlements, the debt balloons again after 2020 due to Baby Boomer retirements."

In just that seemingly simple sentence there's so much casually tossed-out misinformation and obfuscation at to amount to roughly the equivalent of a full-time four-year program of mis-education. But to return to that genius Mike Simpson:

Simpson said this week that a draft will not be ready in time to offer it as a budget resolution this spring. House leaders plan to bring a House GOP budget up for a vote on March 26.

A source close to the effort said the focus is on drafting now, and negotiators will address when to unveil the result later.

Simpson however said waiting until the lame-duck session to start negotiating a grand bargain does not make sense.

After the election, Congress will face deadline pressures to raise the debt ceiling, deal with expiring Bush-era tax rates and address automatic cuts triggered by the supercommittee's failure. The conventional wisdom is that any politically painful choices like cutting Medicare or raising taxes has to wait until then.

"We can't give up for a year on trying to address this problem. I think we have to do something," Simpson said.

He said that he has personally talked about the project to House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), who failed to secure a grand bargain with President Obama last summer. But he said leadership is not driving the effort at this point.

Simpson said his involvement at this stage is mainly continuing to educate members of the need to compromise and solve the looming deficit problems sooner rather than later.

The drafting, which he is not taking the lead on, is proving difficult, he said, noting that major deficit proposals in the last year involved major holes.

MIKE IS NO RELATION TO THAT OTHER SIMPSON, RIGHT?

Continuing:

The president's fiscal commission plan, crafted by former Sen. Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.) and Erskine Bowles, did not completely address healthcare and was vague on what tax breaks to eliminate. {Did not completely address healthcare??? And was vague on what tax breaks to eliminate? Really??? -- Ed.]

"One of the problems with Bowles-Simpson, Domenici-Rivlin, Gang of Six is they're all concepts," Simpson said. "That's different than trying to put things into legislative language."

(Presumably this is still Mike "Not Just a Pretty Concept" Simpson running off his mouth.)

#

There IS An Alternative To The Obama-Ryan Conservative Consensus

Even as polling shows the American people recoiling from anti-working family Republican extremism in disgust, a dependably cowardly Obama has essentially embraced all their precepts. For him anything is better than a fight-- unless it's bombing innocent third world people from beyond the reach of their weapons.

43% of voters think that House Republicans are doing a worse job now than the Democrats did, compared to only 36% who think the GOP has brought an improvement. 19% think things are about the same. 62% of voters thinking that the Republicans have either made things worse or brought no improvement to an already unpopular Congress does not bode particularly well for the party.

46% of voters say that if there was an election for Congress today they would vote Democratic, compared to only 41% who would vote Republican. That five point advantage for Democrats is only a hair below the margin Republicans won by in the national popular vote last year. A victory of that magnitude for the Democrats next year would at the very least result in the party taking back a large number of the seats it lost last year, and it could be enough to take back the outright majority- hard to say at this point without knowing how good a number the GOP can do in redistricting.... [I]ndependents now say they'd vote Democratic for the House by a 42-33 margin if there was an election today, representing a 28 point reversal in a span of just five months.

Obama is rushing to use Ryan's highly unpopular-- not to mention potentially disastrous-- "budget" or "cause" or whatever it is as a way to pivot back to his failed Catfood Commission's not-quite-but-mostly-as-bad attack on working families.

No one who reads this blog-- and who realizes Blue America very conspicuously did not endorse Obama's run for the presidency in 2008-- should be surprised by Obama unmasking himself as a raging conservative. Did the reactionary Republicans have you hoodwinked by all their silly babble about socialism? Obama is part of the Conservative Consensus, bought and paid for by Wall Street. In fact, for all the money Ryan, Cantor, Miss McConnell, Boehner, Lieberman, McCain and that crew take from the plutocrats, Wall Street gave Obama more cash than any of them-- by far. Wall Street didn't finance Obama's short political career because they felt it was about time for America to have an African-American president or because they got taken in by Hope & Change. They knew exactly what they were buying-- and it's all in his Cat Food Commission blueprint:

Obama will not blaze a fresh path when he delivers a much-anticipated speech Wednesday afternoon at George Washington University. Instead, he is expected to offer support for the commission’s work and a related effort underway in the Senate to develop a strategy for curbing borrowing. Obama will frame the approach as a responsible alternative to the 2012 plan unveiled last week by House Republicans, according to people briefed by the White House.

Letting others take the lead on complex problems has become a hallmark of the Obama presidency. On health care, last year’s tax deal and the recent battle over 2011 spending cuts, Obama has repeatedly waited as others set the parameters of the debate, swooping in late to cut a deal. The tactic has produced significant victories but exposed Obama to criticism that he has shown a lack of leadership.

Like the House GOP budget plan, the Senate effort-- led by three Democrats and three Republicans known as the Gang of Six-- aims to cut about $4 trillion from the debt over the next decade. But the group is looking to reduce spending in all categories, while urging a rewrite of the tax code that would raise revenue. The Republican plan would cut spending on domestic programs while protecting the military and preserving George W. Bush-era tax cuts that disproportionately benefit high earners.

The work of the Gang of Six is modeled on recommendations of the fiscal commission Obama appointed last year. On Monday, White House press secretary Jay Carney said the commission had “created a framework that may help us reach a deal and a compromise.”

“The fiscal commission showed that you need to look at entitlements, you need to look at tax expenditures, you need to look at military spending, you need to look at all of these issues,” Carney said. “You can’t-- you can’t simply slash entitlements, lower taxes and call that a fair deal.”

“Everyone,” he said, must “share in the burden of bringing our fiscal house into order.”

Sharing the burden? Is that why Obama and his conservative allies expanded the Bush taxcuts for the rich... so they could give that up as "their share of the sacrifice"? Rachel Maddow's perspective-- which is exceedingly kind to the president-- is in the video above. Democrats in Congress will mostly just go along with Obama, the same way so many of them went along with Clinton on NAFTA (even after opposing Bush on it). Not every Democrat is that kind of a Democrat. It's why Blue America loves Marcy Winograd and Deb Bowen and detests Machine hacks like Janice Hahn. It's why our heroes are principled leaders like Bernie Sanders, Alan Grayson, Raúl Grijalva, Keith Ellison and Donna Edwards. It's why we're endorsing Norman Solomon today and it's why we endorsed Nick Ruiz as our first candidate for 2012. Nick continues to provide a model of alternative progressive leadership to the drivel Obama is passing off as happily centrist. This morning he promised to not let us down:

The one thing we can no longer do-- that too many Democrats continue to do in this country-- is suffer fools on the right. And the one thing Democrats must do is remember who they are... remember when everything was possible. It still is. But we must work together to reject everything that is foolish about the Republican agenda, and Democrats that assist them. Our time has come: to replace that agenda with a progressive one of our own making, not simply talking points, or slogans about change and the future but a substantive, comprehensive public policy that makes a better way of life for all of our people our priority. Truly progressive Democrats will offer ideas on how to make our country a better place for us all, rather than simply better for a fraction of our population.

By supporting a progressive Democratic campaign like Nicholas Ruiz for Congress, you are saying, "I want better times for more people in America."

Today, Grijalva and Ellison are presenting the alternative to the Conservative Consensus vision of governance that is embodied by Paul Ryan and Barack Obama-- two Wall Street unabashed hirelings, the People's Budget. This is what their proposal seeks to accomplish:

• Eliminates the deficits and creates a surplus by 2021

• Puts America back to work with a “Make it in America” jobs program

• Protects the social safety net

• Ends the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq

• Is FAIR (Fixing America’s Inequality Responsibly)

Columbia University economist Jeffery Sachs describes it as "humane, responsible, and most of all sensible, reflecting the true values of the American people and the real needs of the floundering economy. Unlike Paul Ryan's almost absurdly vicious attack on the poor and working class, the People's Budget would close the deficit by raising taxes on the rich, taming health care costs (including a public option), and ending the military spending on wars and wasteful weapons systems."

We're not going to have a better president than Obama in 2012. It's either him-- a conservative-- or one of the Republican reactionaries. In any case, a fighter for the privileged ruling elite. If you want to see someone standing up for working families... fight like hell to elect real progressives to Congress, men and women like Bernie Sanders in the Senate, Raúl Grijalva in the House and congressional candidates like Deb Bowen, Norman Solomon and Nick Ruiz.

Why Bother Making Paul Ryan Budget Chair-- Just Let Wall Street Write The Budget Directly

Feel the bipartisan disdain for non-Insiders and non-wealthy Americans! Ryan, who has been tasked by Wall Street-- who have paid him incredibly well for the job-- with dismantling Social Security and Medicare (thanks, Wisconsin; this could be more harmful to America than what you elected to the U.S. Senate in 1946). After Ryan gets the bipartisan camaraderie flowing with an unheartfelt paean to a conservative Democrat who was defeated last month, he launches into his Wall Street script: "I believe this commission has been a success. Those who refuse to confront the challenges facing us [and by this he means the vast, vast majority of the American people who see the challenges facing us differently from the Insiders], they have no where else to hide. If they label various proposals too draconian or austere, well, they're going to have to come up with their own right now." I guess he slept though the serious and reasonable proposals that fellow commissioner Jan Schakowsky made a month ago. You can watch Ryan's entire disingenuous statement about being adult here:



In the end, the GOP strategy was to have Ryan and his two House cronies vote against the proposals because Ryan hopes he can just destroy the social safety net without making rich people pay their fair share of taxes. In his world, the dreadful Catfood Commission proposals were too balanced. He has since announced he intends to take all the draconian parts out of it and weave them into next year's budgetary process, the Republicans' plan to gut healthcare reform. Meanwhile, though, a progressive Think Tank, the Center for American Progress, has heard Ryan's clarion call for progressives to come up with their own proposal if they don't like the Catfood Commissions, and they did. They're confident that though addressing the long-term federal budget deficit is a daunting challenge, it's not an insurmountable one and their proposal to bring total government revenues into balance with total government spending-- with the exception of interest payments on the national debt-- "is achievable and would pave the way for a federal budget on a sustainable, responsible, path." And, unlike Ryan, they realistically address the revenue side of the problem. "In this report we offer revenue-generating plans that will hit four deficit-reduction targets: 33 percent of the way to primary balance in 2015, then 50 percent, 67 percent, and 100 percent. The most far-reaching of the revenue plans, the 100 percent tax revenue option, relies on seven distinct tax increases. This plan would generate $255 billion in new revenue by: Implementing a graduated surtax on adjusted gross income for households making more than half a million dollars per year" as well as

* Imposing a $10 per barrel fee on imported oil

* Returning the estate tax to pre-Bush tax cut levels—a $1 million exemption and a 55-percent rate

* Removing the cap on the employer side of the Social Security payroll tax

* Indexing the entire tax code to a better measure of inflation

* Increasing the top rate on capital gains and dividends

* Increasing the ordinary income tax rates on tax brackets between $140,000 and $380,000

These tax revenue plans are the complements to those spending cut plans outlined in our previous report. Taken together, these are five separate tax and spending plans that would put the federal budget into primary balance in 2015. The major difference between them, of course, is the varying ratio of spending cuts to revenue increases. In the abstract, some might prefer a solution that is completely, or mostly, spending cuts. With the details laid out, however, such a course seems foolish and politically impossible. The other extreme, getting to primary balance solely with new revenue, is also a highly unlikely outcome.

...Any deficit reduction plan is a balancing act between spending cuts, tax increases, the needs of the nation, and the wide range of views on which of these are most important. This report offers five different balances for getting to the 2015 target of primary balance. We believe the 50-50 plan, accompanied by a crusade to deliver government services more efficiently and effectively, offers the best option.

Meanwhile, anyone interested in helping to make sure Ryan's stink as Chairman of the House Budget Committee doesn't go beyond two years, can do so here. You can be sure the DCCC isn't going to change their stripes and start helping-- and someone has to.

Somehow we've got to change the idea that in economic issues the so-called "serious" people can be trusted

"The old Soviet Union had two newspapers, Pravda and Izvestia -- Truth and Light -- and the saying in Moscow was, 'Where there is Truth, there's no Light. And where there is Light, there's no Truth.' It's clear now that the Soviet Union didn't really end.

"The walls came down, and we became them."

-- economist James K. Galbraith, in a blogpost
tearing the Catfish Commission report to shreds

by Ken

As Howie and I, along with scads of other commentators on the Left, have been pointing out repeatedly, under cover of the economic meltdown they themselves did so much to cause, and from which they have managed to get the government to largely extricate their personal interests, the American megacorporate oligarchy has been stealthily advancing a political agenda that even those greedy sons of bitches probably never dreamed they could get away with. I suppose you have to admire the sheer gall.

The fights over the and the Catfood Commission's secretly crafted deficit-reduction proposals and the issue of the expiring Bush tax cuts tend to merge in our minds because they really are part of the same agenda. The same agglomeration of writers has been pointing out since the spawning of the Catfood Commission that it was always devised, not to solve real economic issues -- of which I believe there actually are genuinely critical ones -- but to complete the restructuring of the American economy begun in the Reagan administration, and since then only marginally slowed down, and in many ways actually advanced, by the theoretically ideologically contrary Clinton administration, which in fact shared many of the same assumptions about whose interests should be paramount in the restructured economy.

"Deficit hawks" is the shorthand description for the ideologues of corporate governance who see the deficit as their opening for establishing once and for all who's in charge. And the makeup of the Catfood Commission left no possible doubt that it was commissioned to produce a report that would be a deficit hawk's wet dream. There are pandering pols who profess to be impressed by the commission's "bipartisan" 11-7 vote affirming for the report. Since the ground rules of the commission called for a minimum of 14 "yes" votes, and Bowles and Simpson were unable to drum up more than 11, despite what I assume must have been a fairly intense campaign of "persuasion," suggests how one-sided their document is.

What most disconcerts me about the developing debate about what to do about the deficit is the seemingly universally accepted determination made by our Village political-and-media nexus and for a couple of decades now applied to pretty much any issue that arises, as to who qualifies as a "serious" participant in the discussion. If you swear an oath to Village Principles and Assumptions, you're serious; otherwise you don't even exist. You're consigned to history's future "who could have foreseen?" invisibles. Think of the political and economic catastrophe of the Iraq war and the economic catastrophe of the housing bubble. Plenty of people foresaw both, but even after they were proved right, they not only weren't rewarded, they weren't listened to any more than they had been. Instead generous rewards were given, and the cleanup was entrusted to, the very people who got us into those messes.

The "serious" people.

On the specific issue of the Catfood Commission, economist James K. Galbraith is developing into a "go to" voice of sanity. In a New Deal 2.0 post yesterday, more widely circulated on AlterNet as "Moment of Lies: Galbraith Attacks Lack of Evidence for Frantic Deficit Fear Mongering" (with the subhead "The sky is falling, but not enough to tax the rich apparently"), he began:

The report of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, issued on December 1, 2010 by Chairmen Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, is entitled “The Moment of Truth.” The words appear in block caps on the second page, weighty and portentous. They reappear in the first paragraph of the preamble:

“Throughout our nation’s history, Americans have found the courage to do right by our children’s future. Deep down, every American knows that we face a moment of truth once again.”

These sentences set the tone. The first is a bald-faced lie, as a Westerner like Senator Simpson knows perfectly well. To the contrary, we have often fallen under the sway of robber barons, water barons, oil barons, bison-killers, clear-cutters and strip-miners, hell-bent on maximum pillage in the shortest time. Only occasionally have a few heroes like Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot and Harold Ickes Sr. emerged to battle for the most precious physical elements of our heritage — and then only with limited success.

In the next paragraph, the Commission states the threat:

“Our challenge is clear and inescapable. America cannot be great if we go broke.”

Exactly what it might mean for America to “go broke” is not explained. Nor is it anywhere in the report. . . .

By all means check out Galbraith's post for the specifics of the bogosity of the commission report. My immediate point is the contrast between the "serious" people whom Village pundits are now crediting with being "realistic" about the deficit, as against an economist as respected as Galbraith, who has nevertheless been relegated to the Party of the Invisible. Remember, he was asked for input by the commission, which he provided in the form of a scathing report, which was strenuously ignored. Some of the hardest work the commissioners seems to have performed was ignoring all realities that don't accord with their designated agenda.

And I'm afraid, once again, that anyone looking to the president as a "centrist" compromiser, someone we might hope will stand up at least in part for Americans who aren't tied to the corporate oligarchy, is living in a dream world. Our friend Ian Welsh made this point once again in a blogpost yesterday:

Obama isn’t about compromise

People, Obama is not and never has been a left winger. Nor is he a Nixonian or Eisenhower Republican, that would put him massively to the left of where he is and to the left of the majority of the Democratic party. Instead his a Reaganite, something he told people repeatedly.

Until folks get it through their skulls that Obama is not and never was a liberal, a progressive or left wing in any way, shape or form they are going to continue misdiagnosing the problem. That isn’t to say Obama may or may not be a wimp, but he always compromises right, never left and his compromises are minor. He always wanted tax cuts. He gave away the public option in private negotiations near the beginning of the HCR fight, not the end. He never even proposed an adequate stimulus bill. He bent arms, hard, to get TARP through.

He’s a Reaganite. It’s what he believes in, genuinely. Moreover he despises left wingers, likes kicking gays and women whenever he gets a chance and believes deeply and truly in the security state (you did notice that Obama administration told everyone to take their objections to backscatter scanners and groping and shove them where the sun don’t shine, then told you they’re thinking of extending TSA police state activities to other public transit?)

Let me put it even more baldly. Obama is, actually, a bad man. He didn’t do the right thing when he had a majority, and now that he has the excuse of a Republican House he’s going to let them do bad thing after bad thing. This isn’t about “compromise”, this is about doing what he wants to do anyway, like slashing social security. The Senate, you remember, voted down the catfood comission. Obama reinstituted it by executive fiat.

If the left doesn’t stand against Obama and doesn’t primary him, it stands for nothing and for nobody.

For the record, let me say that I am prepared to believe we indeed have, not so much a "deficit" problem as a "borrowing" problem -- namely that Americans have been encouraged to take on so much debt that our economy, which now produces hardly anything with which we might be able to pay off what we owe, is in for a mighty fall. We have our own economists screaming about it hear Europeans screaming about.

You know, people like Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz and Brad DeLong, people who not only could but did foresee the housing bubble, but whom the Chicago nitwits, not to mention the coalition of megacorporate media and political whores, continue to pretend never existed. We hear it more and more from Europeans -- that is, those of us who occasionally hear Europeans, whom the Right has worked so hard to reduce to bogeypersons to be reviled, presumably for this very purpose. A coming cataclysm in the American economy surely has to be on the minds of the Chinese who own so much of our increasingly dubious paper.

So yes, I am prepared to believe there's a potentially devastating reckoning up ahead. Unfortunately, the people who have been anointed, or have anointed themselves, as "serious" are the last people we should want presiding over it -- or anywhere near it.

#

Will The Richest 1% Give A Few Pennies For The Elderly To Buy Cat Food?

In order for the Cat Food Commission to proceed with issuing a final report, it has to have the backing of 14 members, something that looks nearly impossible at this point. As AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka reiterated Wednesday, the latest deficit commission proposal tells workers 'Drop Dead'-- again. Trumka is urging all the members to "vote against the latest blueprint presented by commission co-chairs Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, which calls for keeping the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy while cutting Social Security and Medicare." He may sound like he's railing against Republicans, but it's the transpartisan conservative elite, of which Obama is a part, that he's addressing this:

Fifteen million people are out of work, and another 11 million have given up looking or are working part-time involuntarily. We need to end tax breaks that send American jobs overseas and invest in jobs by rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure and green technologies. 

We need to put jobs and economic growth first; we must invest in education and infrastructure to be competitive in the 21st century; Wall Street and the wealthy must bear their share of the burden; and we need to deal with the growth of health care costs.

Only 7 corporate shills have endorsed the plan so far: the co-chairs Bowles and Simpson; conservative Democrat Kent Conrad and Republican Judd Gregg, the leaders of the Senate Budget Committee; former OMB and CBO director and hateful Wall Street whore Alice Rivlin; Honeywell CEO David Cote; and Ann Fudge, a former CEO of Young & Rubicam Brands. But as many commissioners have already said NO, 4 who see it the same way as Trumka: Dick Durbin, Andy Stern, Jan Schakowsky and Xavier Becerra, who oppose fixing the deficit on the backs of the poor and elderly, plus 3 Wall Street shills who oppose any kind of balance at all-- Paul Ryan, Dave Camp and Jeb Hensarling. Obama's Wall Street-oriented economic team will no doubt include a number of the commission’s proposals in his next budget and his favorite Republican, Paul Ryan, the new House Budget chairman, will write the worst of the panel’s ideas into the fiscal 2012 congressional budget resolution.

First thing Thursday morning Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) attempted to get the Senate to pass the Emergency Senior Citizens Relief Act, which would put a $250 cost of living check in the hands of seniors. The Republicans refused to even allow a vote. On the other side of the Hill, the House passed, 213-203 the rule to allow a vote later today on the Middle Class Tax Cuts as a stand alone proposition without further enriching the wealthiest families with billions of dollars that the country cannot afford. Notice all those Blue Dogs licking Boehner's ass. Expect to see two years of that starting in January-- as though it hasn't been going on for years already. Many of the conservative, vehemently anti-family Democrats who joined the Republicans in voting against the rule were defeated by the own constituents last week and, thankfully, won't be in the House next year-- like John Adler (NJ), Travis Childers (MS), Melissa Bean (IL), Allen Boyd (FL), Bobby Bright (AL), Stephanie Herseth Sandlin (SD), Jim Marshall (GA), Ann Kirkpatrick (AZ), Walt Minnick (ID), Zack Space (OH) and Harry Mitchell (AZ). The problem is that there are still a few loud, right-wing Blue Dogs inside the Democratic caucus who voters overlooked and who showed their fangs today when they crossed the aisle and voted against middle class tax cuts: Dan Boren (OK), Heath Shuler (NC), Jim Matheson (UT), Jason Altmire (PA), Lipinski the Younger (IL), Mike Ross (AR)...

The greatest loss to America-- by far-- in the midterms was the loss from government, hopefully only temporarily, of Alan Grayson. Yesterday he was on the floor of the House explaining the mania inside the GOP for extending tax cuts for the wealthiest 1%. The truth is ugly and no one wants to say it aloud-- the Republican decision makers are the wealthiest 1%. Watch Grayson explain their "endless braying" in a way no one won't understand:



For his part, Boehner looked even more puffy, teary-eyed and orange than usual when he did another complete flip flop and referred to a bill to give relief to 98% of American taxpayers as "chicken crap."

“I’m trying to catch my breath so I don’t refer to this maneuver going on today as chicken crap, alright?” Boehner told reporters in the Capitol Thursday. “But this is nonsense. Alright? The election was one month ago. We’re 23 months from the next election and the political games have already started, trying to set up the next election. We had an honest conversation at the White House about the challenges that we face to get out of here and to take care of what the American people expect of us. And the roll this vote out today, it really is just what you think I was going to say anyway.”

Speaker Pelosi's blog dealt effectively with the twisted Republican lies that the media has obligingly and uncritically injected into the debate:


Whopper #1: We don’t have a taxing problem; we have a spending problem.

TRUTH: A decade of Republican rule in Washington nearly doubled the national debt, and turned a record surplus into a record deficit. It’s time to stop exploding the deficit with a $700 billion giveaway to the wealthiest Americans-- which economists have shown has not trickled down to the Middle Class.


Whopper #2: Democrats want to raise taxes on America’s small businesses.

TRUTH: Led by Democrats, this Congress has cut taxes eight times for small businesses-- over the objections of Republicans.

Not giving a deficit-busting tax cut to the wealthiest few would ALSO not affect the vast majority of America’s small businesses. The nonpartisan Pulitzer Prize-winning PolitiFact labeled this GOP claim a “pants on fire” falsehood. As PolitiFact concluded:

Two independent studies that looked at the impact of the Democratic proposal on small businesses found that only between 2 to 3 percent of tax filers who report having what can be thought of as small business income will be affected.

Whopper #3: Okay so it’s only 3% of small businesses-- but that 3% includes 750,000 businesses and accounts for 50% of small business income.

TRUTH: Who are they? Included in that small percentage of “small businesses” affected (2-3 percent) is anyone who receives any type of partnership or business income-- and many of them are not what you would consider “small business owners.” They include hedge fund managers, private equity fund managers, owners of privately held multinational companies, lobbyists, and partners in major law firms.


Whopper #4: Tax cuts for the rich create jobs.

TRUTH: America is just starting to come out of the worst economy since the Great Depression after a decade of a giant tax cut for the rich. Conversely, we had our strongest economy in years-- creating 22 million jobs-- and four years of budget surpluses at the end of the Clinton administration. Democrats would like to return to that kind of economic growth, deficit control, and tax rate for the wealthiest few.

In fact, top economists have busted the myth that tax cuts for the rich create jobs.

Alan Blinder, Co-Director of Princeton University’s Center for Economic Policy Studies and former Vice Chairman of the Fed

“Not all budgetary dollars are created equal. Some have a lot of bang for the buck, and some have very little. The GDP increase per dollar of budgetary cost is in the range of 1.6, 1.7 for things like food stamps and unemployment benefits, and in the range of .35 for extending the Bush tax cuts. We could get some substantial job creation by simply reprogramming the $75 billion that would be saved over the next two years by not extending the upper-bracket Bush tax cuts and spending it instead on unemployment benefits, food stamps, and the like.”

William Gale, Co-Director of the Tax Policy Center

“Are there other ways to use that same amount of money that would give a bigger bang for the buck? The answer is definitely yes…Extending the Bush tax cuts came in No. 11 [in a recent CBO analysis] – the worst option, the lowest bang for the buck of any of the other options.”

Paul Krugman, New York Times Columnist and Winner of Nobel Prize for Economics

“…it’s hard to think of a less cost-effective way to help the economy than giving money to people who already have plenty, and aren’t likely to spend a windfall.”

Whopper # 5: We shouldn’t raise taxes on Americans in a recession.

TRUTH: That’s not what’s being proposed. Congressional Democrats and President Obama will permanently cut taxes for 98 percent of Americans and 97 percent of small businesses-- and help get the Bush deficit under control.

In the end, the vote was 234-188. The only 3 Republicans willing to break ranks with their fascist party and vote in favor of their own constituents were John Duncan (TN), Walter Jones (NC) and Rand Paul (TX). On the other hand 20 conservative Democrats cross the aisle in the other direction and once again showed disdain for ordinary working families. That number included most of the usual suspects, many of whom were defeated last month. Among the ones who will have to be dealt with in 2012 are Dan Boren (Blue Dog-OK), Jim Matheson (Blue Dog-UT), Mike McIntyre (Blue Dog-NC), and Jerry McNerney (CA).



UPDATE: Obama Stacked His Cat Food Commission With Anti-Social Security Warriors But They Couldn't Kill Social Security Anyway

Obama's so-called Deficit Commission, the nadir, so far, of his ill-starred administration, completely failed. Needing 14 votes to open the door to dismantling Social Security-- the conservative dream for 75 years-- they missed another opportunity, although Durbin betrayed working families at the last minute and voted with the Big Business interests he pretends to oppose on most days. The final vote was 11-7 and Obama couldn't serve the interests of the ruling elite that financed his presidency. Voters need to be more careful about what's behind the symbolism and slogans they take to heart in the future.

The final vote was 11-7, short of the 14 votes needed to prompt congressional action according to the panel's rules. It was supported by three elected Republicans and three elected Democrats, along with five of Obama's appointees. Three Republicans and three Democrats voted no, along with one Obama appointee.

"I believe that we can do it without further eroding the middle class in America," said Democratic Rep. Jan Schakowsky of Illinois, the most vocal critic of the panel's plan. Noting it involves painful decisions, she asked, "painful for whom?"

Now it will be up to Obama and congressional leaders to deal with the commission's far-reaching recommendations. But no action is required, as would have been the case if the plan had received 14 votes.

Nobody Likes Getting Peed On... Unless You're A Teabagger

You know we love Rachel Maddow here at DWT, right? The clip above, from Monday night's show, just went to further reinforce that. It's so worth watching, even if you saw it live. This week Congress, a body mostly comprised of millionaires, will decide whether or not to address the most pressing problem facing most people in this country: the economy. Most people who have been observing that body don't feel they're even capable of moving forward and making the commonsense decisions to do what they get paid so handsomely to do by the taxpayers. Instead, they will, once again, choose the interests of the wealthiest 1 or 2 percent over the dire needs of the rest of us.

And early yesterday DFA sent out a letter right in line with Rachel's basic message-- a letter aimed as much towards Obama and other conservative Democrats as towards GOP reactionaries:

Let's just call this so-called "Deficit Commission" what it really is-- an attack on the middle class.

From the very start, right-wing Republicans have been using the commission as a platform to destroy Social Security. They want to cut benefits and raise the retirement age, knowing full well that it will throw millions of seniors into poverty.

It's wrong. That's why we supported candidates who stood strong for Social Security and that's why we're working today to hold them accountable to the promises they made.

Call your Senators right now (at 1-866-529-7630) and tell them Hands Off Social Security.

When we asked DFA members where they stood on Social Security, the answer was clear -- you said to stand strong for Social Security -- No cuts, no raising the retirement age -- and that is exactly what we're doing.

We'll deliver our Hands Off Social Security petition, with almost 100,000 signatures from across the country, directly to members of the House of Representatives this week. But today's target is the U.S. Senate. Whether your Senator is a supportive Democrat or a right-wing Republican bent on destroying Social Security, your call still has an impact. Strong supporters use these calls to back them up on the Senator floor and some Republicans will think twice about sticking their neck out against seniors if their offices are flooded with calls too.

So don't throw your hands up and think this call isn't worth it, especially because DFA members aren't alone when it comes to protecting Social Security. On Election Day, we polled voters nationwide to ask them where they stood and 85 percent said they don't want to see ANY cuts to Social Security.

That's right, even people who voted for Republicans to take back Congress said they don't want any cuts to Social Security.

Even though he ran for the Senate, quixotically, twice, something tells me Jonathan Tasini doesn't have much hope that that rather hopeless body is going to do anything to benefit ordinary working families any time soon. His new ebook, It’s Not Raining, We’re Getting Peed On, makes the point that there is no debt crisis or deficit crisis and that Obama's Catfood Commission "is a total fraud."

“These are the same people who told us that housing process would never go down, that our Social Security funds would be safe in the stock market, and that Bernie Madoff was an investment genius,” said Tasini, who blogs on how the U.S. economy affects everyday Americans at WorkingLife.org.
 
“The Simpson-Bowles agenda is about politics, not economics,” said Tasini. They’re whipping up false hysteria about deficits to justify continuing the failed and immoral policy of the past thirty years: picking the pockets of ordinary Americans to help the rich get richer.”
 
As Tasini argues in the pages of “It’s Not Raining:”
 
We have the greatest divide between rich and poor in 100 years. And, yet, the richest one percent in America is too busy complaining about having to pay a bit more in taxes. We should be talking about who should pony up to make sure we have plenty of money to do the things we should be doing, but that money apparently is not going to come out of the pockets of bankers, CEOs or the richest one percent.
 
No. It’s the average person. The people who are going to be asked-- by a Democratic president, no less-- to shoulder the burden of the robbery are the people who pack their lunch every day and get paid a wage to work an eight-hour day in a coal mine, factory, office building, firehouse, public service job or school.
 
The pay freeze for federal workers announced yesterday by President Obama, says Tasini, “is totally unnecessary from an economic point of view, and an attack on his most loyal political supporters that is unthinkable.”
 
“The rich back Bush and they get tax cuts,” says Tasini. “Workers in public sector unions back Obama-- and they get a pay freeze. How does that make any sense?”
 
Tasini also criticized liberal groups for buying into the “crisis” rhetoric. “We should be rejecting the whole notion that there is a government deficit or debt ‘crisis’, not crawling on our hands and knees with fancy blueprints and documents to satisfy funders and political pundits,” he said. “Liberal groups are reinforcing, not undoing, the ‘crisis’ rhetoric.”
 
Instead of raising the retirement age, cutting Social Security benefits for seniors, and freezing wages for middle class federal workers, Tasini proposes a four-step plan that will make better use of our resources-- steps that should be taken even without a crisis:
 
·     Raise taxes on the wealthy far above what even Democrats are proposing

·     Extend Medicare to cover all Americans

·     Impose a financial transactions tax on Wall Street

·     Cut defense spending with a focus on real security, instead of costly wars that protect elites at home and abroad.

“This is not an economics problem,” he said. “This is a political problem. It’s not a deficit of money. It’s a deficit of moral leadership and a lack of guts to take on a dysfunctional, decaying ideology called the “free market” and the powerful players behind a bad system.”

Over the course of the next week or two we'll be watching closely to see exactly which Democrats-- aside from Pryor and Ben Nelson-- are demanding primaries for the next cycle.

We Have Consensus! We Have Consensus!

Except none of us are part of it. The people of this country, by overwhelming margins in every poll, do not want to sacrifice Social Security on the alter of deficit reduction. Nor do they want to scuttle Medicare so the wealthiest 1% can continue to pay astoundingly low taxes. This consensus is a consensus inside the ruling elite and any Democrat who grasps it will ruin his or her political career. That includes Obama, whose main hope for holding on to progressives in 2012 is that the GOP nominate someone as bad as Hitler, a distinct possibility. (Apparently holding on to progressives isn't part of his march to reelection; econometrics are.)

In the precious, lighter than air world the elites have created for themselves in Washington, the election earlier this month was "dominated by vague demands for less debt and smaller government." Someone's been watching too much Fox. And the solution, or as they put it in the Post yesterday, "the sacrifices necessary to achieve those goals are coming into sharp focus. Big cuts at the Pentagon. Higher taxes, including those on home ownership and health care. Smaller Social Security checks and higher Medicare premiums."

Now "smaller Social Security checks and higher Medicare premiums" are what the right has been demanding forever. And once there was a Democratic Party to stand up and push back. Now there's Obama... and his Cat Food Commission. "A surprisingly broad consensus is forming around the actions required to stabilize borrowing and ease fears of a European-style debt crisis in the United States. As a presidential commission struggles to build political momentum for such a package, even Republicans who initially opposed the commission's creation are still at the negotiating table." Even Republicans! What a laugh! Reactionary Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn is "open to everything if it gets us where we need to go." And he'll accept the notion that it won't officially be called serfdom or slavery at first.

Coburn is among a dozen lawmakers serving on the independent commission that President Obama created to help rebalance the federal budget. The panel will conclude its work after Thanksgiving with a vote that will reveal whether a convincing majority of its 18 members can agree on a deficit-reduction strategy.

Whatever the outcome, the plan unveiled this month by co-chairmen Erskine B. Bowles, a chief of staff in the Clinton White House, and Alan K. Simpson, a former Republican senator from Wyoming, has been respectfully received with a few exceptions by both parties. Its major elements are also winning support from a striking line-up of commentators.

Are they in a parallel universe? Every comment I read mentioned "dead on arrival." They hope to kill Social Security and Medicare with easily reinstated military cuts and easily decreased modest tax increases.

Social Security is proving to be the most emotional issue. Over the next 65 years, Bowles and Simpson would gradually raise the early retirement age from 62 to 64 and the standard retirement age from 67 to 69. They would reduce scheduled benefits for better-off retirees and use a less-generous measure of inflation to calculate cost-of-living increases. And they would guarantee higher benefits to the poorest and oldest retirees, those most in need of additional support.

Organized labor and other liberal activists say the changes would prove devastating to the elderly, particularly janitors, waitresses and other blue-collar workers who cannot stay on the job until they are nearly 70. Meanwhile, neither party is eager to cross seniors, who turned out in big numbers on Nov. 2 and favored Republicans in "historic proportions," according to Democratic pollster Celinda Lake.

"It was a real wake-up call," Lake said, adding that Democrats could benefit by "taking a strong and vocal stand" against any reduction in Social Security benefits.

Remember, this "consensus" they're talking about is a consensus of millionaires. Only 1% of Americans are millionaires but around 50% of congressmen are. "And of these congressional millionaires, 55 have an average calculated wealth in 2009 of $10 million or more, with eight in the $100 million-plus range."

“Few federal lawmakers must grapple with the financial ills -- unemployment, loss of housing, wiped out savings -- that have befallen millions of Americans,” said Sheila Krumholz, the Center for Responsive Politics’ executive director. “Congressional representatives on balance rank among the wealthiest of wealthy Americans and boast financial portfolios that are all but unattainable for most of their constituents.”

In 2009, the median wealth of a U.S. House member stood at $765,010, up from $645,503 in 2008. The median wealth of a U.S. senator was nearly $2.38 million, up from $2.27 million in 2008.

I'm not saying all millionaires-- congressional or otherwise-- should be strung up or drawn and quartered or even guillotined, and certainly not without fair trials, but the only consensus from millionaires I'm interested in hearing about is from the Patriotic Millionaires who are putting self-serving class warfare aside and calling on Obama to let the Bush tax cuts on the rich expire already. Here's part of the letter they sent fellow millionaire Barack Obama yesterday:

For the fiscal health of our nation and the well-being of our fellow citizens, we ask that you allow tax cuts on incomes over $1,000,000 to expire at the end of this year as scheduled.

We make this request as loyal citizens who now or in the past earned an income of $1,000,000 per year or more.

We have done very well over the last several years. Now, during our nation's moment of need, we are eager to do our fair share. We don't need more tax cuts, and we understand that cutting our taxes will increase the deficit and the debt burden carried by other taxpayers. The country needs to meet its financial obligations in a just and responsible way.

Letting tax cuts for incomes over $1,000,000 expire, is an important step in that direction.

That's the kind of consensus I like. But the kind of consensus inside the ruling elite was better expressed a few days ago by slimy Minnesota Representative and incoming Labor Committee Chair, John Kline, one of the most virulently anti-labor congressmen ever elected. His perspective is we can't fund everything and jobless benefits aren't a priority. Although Kline and the rest of the GOP managed to block extending unemployment benefits to 2.5 million American families last week, they're debating whether or not to extend the Bush tax cuts for the richest two percent of Americans, at a cost of $830 billion over the next decade. Earlier this week, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) called for a permanent extension of the tax cuts for the rich, while deriding extending unemployment benefits as “some new massive spending.” If there's anyone in Minnesota further right than Bachmann, it's her pal Kline, who is also fanatically devoted to extending the Bush tax cuts to millionaires and who had this to say on Minnesota Public Radio:

KLINE: That’ll be a tougher lift in the 112th Congress. We’ve had unemployment benefits be extended for almost two years in some states, a little bit less in Minnesota. When you’re running a one and a half trillion dollar deficit per year, that’ll be part of the discussion as to whether that’s a priority for how we’re going to spend money. I would just reiterate what I said earlier, that the obligation for the Congress is to look at the entire budget and recognize that we’re borrowing over forty cents of every dollar that we spend, and say what are the priorities going to be. We can’t fund everything.

Q: But what do you tell those folks hanging on by a thread who really need those benefits?

KLINE: Well, they, heh, the best thing to do for them is to get the economy back on track and get businesses hiring so that they have a job that they can go to. We simply don’t have the money to keep extending unemployment benefits indefinitely. We just don’t have the money.

Here's how this played out in New Jersey. The gluttonous millionaire isn't one of the Patriotic Millionaires:

How do the Catfood Commissioners know which kinds of spending to target and which to leave alone? Meet the U.S. permanent government

[Don't forget to click to enlarge]

Why are the recommendations of the "deficit-reduction commission" stacked toward an assault on the popular government programs labeled "entitlements"? Because of who was appointed to the commission. And why were those particular people appointed to the commission?

by Ken

The other day WaPo wag Al Kamen reported this news on the executive-appointment front in his "In the Loop" column:

Republicans get a target

As expected, the White House, after nearly two years, has finally announced a pick for director of the Justice Department's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The choice is Andrew Traver, a career employee who is now special agent in charge of the ATF's Chicago field office.

As we mentioned back on Aug. 4, if approved, Traver would be the first-ever Senate-confirmed ATF director. The position had been filled (at the Treasury Department and more recently at Justice) without Senate input. Since the job became Senate-confirmable in 2006, it seems, no one has made it past the watchful eyes of the gun lobby.

Hard to imagine Traver will be approved by the new Senate. While they're at it, maybe the folks at the White House will finally nominate someone to be solicitor general, name another to run Justice's Office of Legal Counsel and find a qualified nominee for the tax operation.

Did you get that? "Since the job [of ATF director] became Senate-confirmable in 2006, it seems, no one has made it past the watchful eyes of the gun lobby.

Now the NRA isn't a natural part of our permanent government. To give it its due, through sheer organizational single-mindedness and ruthlessness, it bullied its way into its position of power, from which it has an effective veto over any policy matter that in any way impinges on its guncentric agenda. And the permanent government for once yielded. The power of the NRA in its domain is pretty much unchallenged -- a wise decision for those who wish to control the levers of power, considering how well the NRA knows how and is willing and eager to, um, participate in the electoral process. (A quick show of hands, please, among those out there who hold elective office that requires them to face reelection or are contemplating running for same: How would you like to run your campaign against the full political force of the NRA?)

And who exactly makes up this permanent government of which I speak? It's people inside government, yes, but even more importantly people outside government, really important (read "rich") and well-connected (read "rich") people. It's not "rich people" as a class; there are probably a fair number of rich people who, as long as they can hold onto what they've got, aren't much interested in running the country. And there are rich people, as we keep seeing when people like Linda McMahon and Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina whom no amount of money will put into office -- though their mistake may simply be in trying to be office-holding members of the PG.

This won't define the PG for you, but we get some useful images when journalist-turned-cabinet-minister-turned-Prime Minister Jim Hacker (Paul Eddington) announces to the cabinet secretary, Sir Humphrey Appleby (Nigel Hawthorne), and to his principal private secretary, Bernard Woolley (Derek Fowlds): "I know exactly who reads the papers."



Of course we don't usually see the PG at work. Its handiwork is usually most visible in the actions (or non-actions) of the people who do its bidding. If, for example, you look at the CVs of virtually all the Catfood Commission members, you'll see the network of ties that make their conclusions on deficit reduction so drearily predictable. Never mind that the "economic realities" they and their cronies keep warning us we have to confront if we wish to be taken seriously are challenged up and down the line by economists who aren't being paid off by the PG masters of the "deficit hawks." Or that when they whimper solemnly that they've explored every imaginable budget area for budget savings, they're just kidding. They have homed in on the areas their PG masters wish them to target, and will take away not so much as a thin dime from the areas their PG masters wish left undisturbed. (See Howie's post yesterday, "The Catfood Commission's Dark Vision For Our Country Isn't Inevitable.")

Now, not everyone in government. What we need to recognize is the ferocious power the PG exerts on officeholders to conform. A lot of people have invested an awful lot of money in arranging a status quo that suits them well enough, thank you, and while they always have helpful ideas for how that status quo can be (according to their perspective) "improved," none of those ideas would constitute what we would call "reform." More like de-form. You know, the sort of thing the Bush regime and the get-rich-quick Republican Congress specialized in, and that the new Republican House (and, coming in January 2013, the new Republican Senate) is poised to be offering its cash customers.

The rewards for "going along" range from generous to profligate. As we're so often made aware, the first consideration of most elected officials is getting reelected, and as the cost of getting elected has risen so enormously, our elected officials are in virtually perpetual fund-raising mode. Government service also attracts large numbers of the kind of people who are simply drawn to venues where large quantities of money are moved around. You know, the kind who specialize in ways of moving chunks of that money into their personal pockets. The PG both controls vast sources of campaign and just plain bribe-payment cash, and also often has the power to turn off the money tap for candidates it wishes to disadvantage.

In addition, lately I've been eavesdropping on chatter among people who've seen the inside of government and report that one of the most powerful engines for status-quo maintenance is the incredible inertial pull of the PG minions who fill the zillions of staff positions at all levels of government, certainly including the members of both houses of Congress. It's not necessarily a matter of being "conservative" in the political sense, but of being conservative in the literal sense of fighting tenaciously to preserve the system they've signed on to, in which they're making, or have made, their way.

Some of them, perhaps even many of them, may have made their way into government service for reasons as ringingly idealistic as DWT readers could hope for. However, it takes a really special kind of person to withstand the pounding the system inflicts on people who don't grasp the wisdom of "getting along." For both elected officials and staffers, it's a carrot-and-stick deal: rewards stretching on into the foreseeable future, even if unfavorably wafting electoral circumstances should thrust you out of office. There are, after all, all those lobbying positions, not to mention all those appointive positions inside and outside government where a "good soldier" can land on his feet. In case there are any electeds who somehow don't get the message, they're surrounded by all those staff grunts to keep trying to drum it into them.

As Howie has pointed out to me often since he's been working actively with candidates, the stifling effect of status-quo-driven staff sets in earlier and earlier in the electoral process. One traditional transformation point comes when an insurgent candidate is actually elected. Once that magic "-elect" is added to the office title, the sharks move in. Experienced staffers who know now that there are actual jobs to be had with, say, Congressman-elect X. And overnight, a candidate who was desperate for any attention he could get becomes unavailable except through his "people." We might also consider the kind of people who by basic personality type are drawn to being somebody important's people.

And more and more the process starts earlier than that. Candidates who want to be taken "seriously" -- and it's pretty hard to raise "serious" cash if you're not taken "seriously" -- are under pressure to hire, well, "serious" campaign staff and campaign consultants. It's gotten worse than that. Howie is going to be reporting some pretty stomach-turning revelations about a seemingly seamless integration of the Democratic congressional campaign apparatus with consultants whom candidates are, shall we say, urgently advised to use.

Whereas the price for not going along is, well, you're on your own. If you can keep getting reelected, more power to you, but not in the sense of any real power -- there are plenty of institutional ways to decrease the chances that a troublemaker doesn't amass much real power. And reelection isn't going to be a lead-pipe cinch. A chap like Russ Feingold, about as uncontrolled as a present-day U.S. senator can be, had precious few chits to call in from the PG, and against a deep-pocketed candidate whom no sane person would want on the same planet with our government, in an election climate where so many voters were determined to show that the human brain can be good for nothing more than filling intracranial space, he was hung out to dry. I suspect few tears were shed by either "the people who run the country" or "the people who own the country."

And that's all without even mentioning the vast apparatus that has grown up to support the PG, the hordes of media and other hangers-on whose livelihood waxes and wanes in exactly the same way as those of elected officeholders and staff people, the people who fill out that oh-so-harmonious, largely nonpartisan community of interest that Digby has so elegantly and usefully dubbed the Village -- that misty world where people like David Broder are (yes!) take seriously. There's no practical limit to the rewards for getting along with the Village agenda, and a painful price to be paid for not doing so. Resistance, one might almost say, is futile.

Actually, I find myself suddenly thinking a lot about Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minster, in which a well-meaning but easily befuddled by reality journalist becomes, first, minister of administrative affairs and then, by an astonishing series of "Party Games," prime minister.

In this clip from "Party Games," the extended episode of Yes, Minister that sets the stage for Yes, Prime Minister, Sir Arnold Robinson (John Nettleton), the recently retired cabinet secretary (the highest-ranking official of the official British permanent government, more or less the civil-service counterpart to the prime minister), who regretfully is unable to talk about his new work with the Campaign for the Freedom of Information, chats with his successor, Sir Humphrey, his old Oxford chum, who previously "served" Jim Hacker as the Ministry of Administrative Affairs' permanent secretary, about the candidates to be the next prime minister. As they describe the characteristics of their ideal PM (someone who's "malleable" and can be "guided" in the direction of not doing much of anything), there comes a magical moment when the same preposterous idea occurs to them more or less simultaneously.

The permanent government picks a PM

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