Pete Peterson Is Dead-- Guest Post By Jonathan Tasini

Author and labor activist-- former president of the National Writers Union-- Jonathan Tasini has been doing a phenomenal series of informative candidate interviews on his podcast, The Working Life, like the one above with Kaniela Ing. He manages to get all the candidates with the cutting edge ideas. Today he did the definitive obituary for Pete Peterson, the billionaire Wall Street crook who died Tuesday, age 91.

The Pete Peterson myth the media ignores
-by Jonathan Tasini

Should I be surprised by a fawning, embarrassing obituary for Pete Peterson? No. But, it ignores some very important truths about Pete Peterson and it is instructive about how other elites are treated in the traditional press.

1- The man made his fortune from piling up DEBT (more on that in a moment) to realize profits from buying and selling companies-- which cost tens of thousands of people good-paying jobs. His fortune came at great cost and pain to a lot of people and communities. NO MENTION OF THIS IN THE Times OBIT. Instead, he's treated like some genius and great pillar of the community

2- Despite having made a massive fortune piling up DEBT, Peterson spent years running around screaming about government DEBTS, and funding and promoting the entirely false narrative of a deficit/debt "crisis." Which simply does not exist. Which I wrote a book about here. He was singularly responsible for managing to convince an uncritical media and way too many Democrats that a crisis existed, leading to, among other things, the dangerous/lunatic Obama-appointed deficit commission-- better remembered as the "Catfood Commission" because if its recommendations had been implemented, calling for cuts in Social Security and Medicare, millions of seniors and others would be eating just that for 3 meals a day. As an aside: one reason I am skeptical about the drumbeat to depose Nancy Pelosi is that she, opposing her own president (Obama), said, at the time, there would be no cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

3- But this is how elites are treated in this country-- with amnesia or blatant disregard/ignorance of the truth. We just marked the 15th anniversary of the Iraq War-- yet neither George Bush nor Dick Cheney have been held accountable for their war crimes and lies to the public. The man sitting in the Oval Office today benefitted from years of fawning media coverage about his business "acumen," despite years of cheating thousands of people and bankruptcies-- not to mention blatant bigotry and despicable behavior towards women…and, yet, little of that was covered regularly, and, thus, we live with the hand-held-to-the-mouth shock coverage about each day's tweets when the character, behavior and record of this lowlife was abundantly clear years ago. If only one could hope that reading Peterson's obit critically would change perspectives…but, alas…

A NYT Lesson in Horrendous Economic Journalism-- Guest Post By Jonathan Tasini

On Monday, journalist and author Jonathan Tasini wrote a "Dear colleagues" letter about bias in mainstream journalism, especially in the coverage of economics. It impressed me so much that I asked him if I could publish it here at DWT. He graciously agreed.

Mainstream/traditional journalism is replete with examples of bias and utter cluelessness when it comes to economics. You can’t get a better example of that than the absolutely horrendous piece today in the New York Times entitled Public Servants Are Losing Their Foothold in the Middle Class-- which purports to explain why public workers can’t pay their bills. The piece is full of what I call “immaculate conception economics.” Or, in plain English, shit just happens, and when we can’t explain how it happens, we just fall back on blind theology. Or, as the immortal Warden Samuel Norton said: “Lord! It's a miracle! Man up and vanished like a fart in the wind!” To wit:

• The word “union” does not appear a single time in the article. Not to explain why public workers actually made a decent living-- it wasn’t thanks to the munificence of politicians, Republican or Democrat. It was because of union organizing. Nor to explain why, as politicians and right-wing billionaires have prosecuted a relentless war against public sector unions, wages have declined. This is especially glaring when the two “journalists” describe the wave of uprisings by teachers in “red” states-- teachers who belong to unions, unions that are coordinating the protests of their members.
• We read: “Many of the jobs created-- most in service industries-- lack stability and security. They pay little more than the minimum wage and lack predictable hours, insurance, sick days or parental leave. The result is that the foundation of the middle class continues to be gnawed even as help-wanted ads multiply.” Why do you think those jobs lack stability and security? It is because union density has declined dramatically in the past 30 years.
• This is telegraphed, by the way, early in the article: “But globalization and automation aren’t the only forces responsible for the loss of those reliable paychecks”. Ah, yes, those anodyne terms of “globalization” and “Automation”-- leaders and CEOs, looking to enrich themselves and enslave labor around the world, driving down wages and cutting benefits (think: the Waltons of Wal-Mart and Jeff Bezos), had nothing to do with that. It’s just the inexorable “globalization” and “automation.”
• Later: “Short of money, many states have also privatized services like managing public water systems, road repair, emergency services or prisons, transferring jobs from the public sector to private companies that have reduced salaries and benefits to increase their profits.” It’s a miracle! It has nothing to do with those jobs being transferred to NON-UNION companies who cut wages and benefits because there is no way for workers to collectively bargain.
• The article repeats the false pension “crisis” meme, describing“… generous pension and benefit commitments made in fatter years came due.” Pensions are DEFERRED COMPENSATION-- not simply some “generous” handout. I don’t even think the “journalists” are conscious that they are using the false pension “crisis” language that has been carefully inserted into the debate by people ideologically opposed to decent retirement standards. And you didn’t need Russian bots or Facebook to assist—this has been political rhetoric encouraged for many years by politicians spanning the political spectrum, funded by billionaires particularly the much-lauded late Pete Peterson. It’s a lie.
• About privatization. You would think that, in describing the privatization of work, the two “journalists” would consider inserting even a sentence or two to make the point that lots of data shows privatization is a failure, costs more to the public in actual dollars and results in poorer service. Not a word.

That is just a small sampling. This is terrible journalism. An embarrassment.



After speaking with Jonathan, I asked three of the most union-forward congressional candidates I know-- Randy Bryce (WI-01), Jared Golden (ME-02) and Jenny Marshall (NC-05)-- what they thought of his perspective. As you may have guessed, all three are as serious as Tasini about the role unions play. Bryce told me that "unions are the only thing keeping corporate greed’s boot from crushing our throats. Work sites that I have been on are safe thanks to the demands of unions. Those sites are safe whether one pays union dues or not. Don’t complain why we have what we do-- ask why you don’t have it."

And Golden's perspective is as Majority Whip of the Maine legislature, not from a construction site. He said he agrees wholeheartedly with Tasini. "I have proudly voted four years in a row in the Maine Legislature against the GOP’s so called 'Right to Work' proposals that aim to gut Maine’s remaining unions, including our public employee unions. For eight years now" he continued, "under the tea party Governor Paul LePage’s leadership the state has frozen pay raises and left department positions vacant, and made it a priority to go after public employment and unions, all while pursuing plans to privatize government services from bridges to prisons to health and human services. This country needs stronger unions in more sectors and in Congress I’ll do everything I can to strengthen the labor movement because like you rightly pointed out as unions have declined so have middle-class jobs, wages and benefits."

Golden picked up another union endorsement last week, IBEW 2327. They now join the ranks of IAM, IAFF, the Professional Fire Fighters of Maine, IAM Local S7, the Maine State Council of Machinists and the UAW BMDA Local 3999 that have all endorsed his candidacy.

And Jenny is a member of the Teachers union herself. Last night, she told us that "Unions are what built the middle class and created stable communities across this country. It was due to the strength of their numbers that they demanded and won fair wages and benefits for workers. Those union shops then pushed private sector employers to do the same. This was not lost on businesses and government leaders who tried to reduce the union’s power to negotiate salaries, benefits and working conditions. After years of systematic assault on their ability to organize, unionization is on the decline and we can see the effects in our own backyards. It’s a race to the bottom and unless we start protecting workers’ rights to unionize. I stand with my union brothers and sisters across this country in our fight for fair labor practices and just compensation."

Teachers Uprisings Are The More Long-Term Story Of The Political Revolution Underway Than Any Single Congressional Eelection-- A Guest Post By Jonathan Tasini

Our old pal, Jonathan Tasini, labor activist, author, podcaster and former Senate candidate, has been on the teacher uprising case for months. He's certain that "those uprisings are the more long-term story of the political revolution underway with far more consequences for the country than the obsession over any single congressional election." A new guest post he originally did for Playboy, Why the Midterm Battleground Could Be in Classrooms Instead of Congress, that "those uprisings have the potential to obliterate the Big Lie in our economic lives, a lie that has bankrupted many states."

Travis Benda is not a name you’ll hear uttered by most political pundits. He may, in fact, never achieve long-term institutional power or become a household name. Yet, his recent surprise primary victory may be signaling a long-term titanic shift in the nation’s attitude toward taxes and what we are willing to pay to have a properly functioning government. This was all triggered, or at least significantly advanced, by the teachers’ uprisings sweeping the country.

Benda is a high school math teacher. In the May 22nd Republican primary, he defeated the House majority floor leader, Jonathan Shell, who two years prior had led Republicans to a takeover of the legislative chamber and was hailed as a paragon of young Republican future leaders. Benda challenged Shell for one basic reason: the incumbent’s support for an anti-teacher pension bill that would have reduced promised benefits.

Benda is a high school math teacher. In the May 22nd Republican primary, he defeated the House majority floor leader, Jonathan Shell, who two years prior had led Republicans to a takeover of the legislative chamber and was hailed as a paragon of young Republican future leaders. Benda challenged Shell for one basic reason: the incumbent’s support for an anti-teacher pension bill that would have reduced promised benefits.

That Benda won running as a Republican only underscores what teachers, and other workers in the education system, have sparked. In mostly conservative states across the country, tens of thousands of teachers and support staff-- defying or skirting laws barring teacher strikes-- poured into the streets and amassed at state capitol buildings. Importantly, they did so almost always with strong support from parents and even many superintendents of school districts, which have been starved for funds.

The public, it seems, has woken up to a stark reality regardless of political affiliation: education, and other key government services that make for a functioning society, need money to run-- and the coffers are empty.

The short-term impact of the teacher uprisings will be felt in November. To be sure, elections hinge on many factors, and it is often hard to isolate, in retrospect, one element that makes the difference between victory or defeat. Yet, taken together, the teachers revolt is arguably going to tip scores of state legislative races, and perhaps the balance of power in Congress-- largely because teachers’ unions, along with other labor and community allies, are making a concerted effort to defeat anti-school funding politicians. To make an obvious point: Teachers, and their educator brethren, are everywhere, in every community, large and small. Consider this: Nearly nine million educators work for states and local governments nationwide, accounting for more than half of all public sector workers.

It would be hard to find a more conservative state than Oklahoma: Republicans control the legislature, governor’s mansion, both seats in the U.S. Senate and every House district. Tax-cutting and business-friendly policies have been an almost unshakeable article of political faith. Yet, Oklahoma was fertile ground for a revolt because its tax-cutting mania created a crisis. As the Oklahoma Policy Institute points out, “state aid funding will remain some $145 million less than it was in FY 2009, even as K-12 enrollment has grown by over 50,000 students. As important as the pay raises are for moving Oklahoma teachers towards a fair and competitive salary, schools remain in desperate need of additional operating support to reverse cuts that have led to fewer teachers and support professionals, larger class sizes, fewer courses and programs, and outdated textbooks and supplies.” It’s worth hammering home the point that despite an exploding student population, the current education budget is lower than a decade ago.

The teachers’ union in Oklahoma sees the opening, and is backing 100 candidates for state office, 48 who are union members and the rest who have ties to union members or simply support the union’s agenda. “OEA is supporting many teacher candidates this election cycle, but we will also support non-educator candidates and incumbents who show strong support for public education,” says Alicia Priest, the union’s president. “If an incumbent has a great voting record on education, we will stick by them, even in the face of an educator running against them.”

North Carolina also has a strong teacher resistance movement. “We are doing targeted calls to districts to defeat Republicans, calling voters and focusing on education,” Mark Jewell, the president of the state’s educators’ association, told me. Those efforts may, then, tip two federal House seats to Democrats-- the 13th Congressional district held by an incumbent Republican, and the 9th Congressional district where the incumbent Republican lost a primary race.

Setting aside the November elections this year, I am more intrigued by the longer-term impact of the teacher uprisings because it is possibly much more consequential for the nation’s economic future. Teachers, partly because they are held in high esteem by the public, have been able to bring focus to the Big Lie: For four decades, Republican ideologues (buttressed by a good helping of Democrats) told the people that society would be just fine without robust taxes to adequately fund government’s basic services. You know the rap: Cut taxes deeply, let the money trickle down to everyone, and, presto, big booms in jobs and economic output would follow. The Big Lie came all dressed up with a theory called “supply side economics,” which Republicans, business leaders and billionaires could foist on people to give the whole gimmick some respectability and believability.

Except supply side economics, starting with its big splashy debut at the core of Reaganomics in the 1980s, was proven, time and again, to fail. It was a theory with no empirical data proving it worked. There is virtually no evidence—none—that shows tax cuts spark job growth, certainly not tax cuts entirely structured as gross handouts to the very wealthy. But, what can be documented quite well is society’s breakdowns-- crumbling roads, failing schools, poor housing, soaring healthcare costs-- that all trace back to the tax cut-starving of the government.

From the outset, if its advocates were honest, it was clear that the supply side economic “theory” was primarily a political gambit. People who hated the government simply wanted to kill it-- and dressing up dastardly, dumb policies with a faux economic theory was part of the scam. And it worked, for a time, at least judged by the four decades of relentless reduction in taxes at the state and federal level.

But, like many scams, eventually reality comes crashing in.

Today, the cupboard is bare. Poor teacher pay isn’t an abstract problem that can be waved away by ignorant talking heads on television. Most people will tolerate, grudgingly, crumbling roads. They may also not feel personally effected by fewer parks rangers or even a public library imposing shorter hours because of staffing shortages. But, when your kid does not have pencil and paper, or every day she walks into a crowded classroom with 35 other kids taught by a substitute each year because qualified teachers can’t afford to take a job with starvation-level wages, that’s a problem plopped right on the kitchen table at home, a problem that does not discriminate between Democrats, Republicans or independents.

Meg Wiehe, the deputy director of the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy, the foremost tax analysis research group in the nation, thinks voters are starting to draw the connections. It’s personal for Wiehe. She lives in North Carolina where the “story is yet another example of how lawmakers have prioritized tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations over public services,” she points out. “North Carolina legislators have cut taxes four times in the last five years. When all of the tax cuts are in place, the state will have $3.5 billion less a year to spend on public services, including education. The recent tax cuts will provide the state’s millionaires with an average annual tax cut of more than $45,000, which is nearly as much as the average teacher’s annual salary of about $50,000.”

West Virginia, where the rebellion started, has been, politically, trending more Republican in elections-- but it still retains a strong awareness of its historical union roots, principally because of the once-mighty United Mine Workers. “The teacher and public employee strike woke a lot of people up to the fact that you cannot tax cut your way to prosperity,” says Ted Boettner, executive director of the West Virginia Center on Budget & Policy. “I’d say at least a third of those striking were Republicans, and many of them for the first time understood that their fate was not a matter of affordability but priority.”

Mark Jewell sees a new sentiment in North Carolina. “The public has always been behind public education. When you go out to western North Carolina, which is more conservative, they like their schools, and they’ve seen them decimated. We saw a lot of Republican teachers out in the streets with us. It opens up a bigger conversation that government is protecting the people, and it’s all an investment. We got the Research Triangle partly because we had a strong public-school system. The idea was you could come to North Carolina and put your child in a public school. Now businesses are saying I can’t bring my workers here if they have to put them in private schools that they can’t afford.”

Arizona’s legislature-- which, except for one session, has been controlled by Republicans since 1978-- has cut taxes every year since 1990, says David Lujan, director of the Arizona Center for Economic Progress who also served as a Democrat in the state House from 2005 to 2013. “Most polling that I saw during those years consistently showed majorities of Arizonans opposed to raising taxes,” he tells me. “In contrast, a number of polls of Arizona voters that I have seen in the past year have consistently shown Arizonans support raising taxes to fund state priorities like public education.” In fact, Lujan says, while this year saw a couple of small tax-cut bills pass, the major tax cut effort, which included a capital gains tax, was defeated principally because of teacher opposition.

Teachers’ union president Priest sees the longer-term shift underway. “It feels as though every day Republicans in Oklahoma have started to shift toward more moderate stances on taxes, recognizing that reasonable taxes are necessary to fund our essential state services like schools and healthcare,” she says. “As a conservative state, however, the anti-tax rhetoric still resonates with many voters. Our Platform Caucus in the legislature, which is extremely anti-tax, seems to be weakening, with many members in jeopardy of losing their seats this year. Until we see what happens in November, though, we won’t know if a real shift has occurred.”

Yet, Oklahoma has seen a fascinating turnaround. In 2012, the governor proposed entirely eliminating the state income tax, claiming it could be done without cutting services. But, in the past session, the legislature passed, with a supermajority vote, a $500 million tax increase, including tax hikes on the heretofore almost untouchable oil and gas industry. “The political makeup of the government has not changed,” says David Blatt, the executive director of the Oklahoma Policy Institute. Significantly driven by the teachers’ uprising, he says, “Lawmakers got the message that voters wanted higher teacher pay even if it means higher taxes.”

As the November election nears, Travis Benda is busying himself with tasks left undone, most having little to do with politics. There is, for example, the unfinished addition to a garage at home. In an overwhelmingly Republican district, Benda knows he is headed for public office, and will almost certainly have less time for personal chores once he is sworn in.

He will be representing a district where he sees a real shift. “What the legislature did in the last session was give tax cuts that were only going to go to those making $175,000 or more, and the cuts in services were disproportionately going to affect those making less than $175,000,” he says, a hit on people like many of his neighbors and constituents. “I live in a rural area, it’s a working class conservative area that still has strong conservative Christian beliefs. I’m more of a social conservative on the Second Amendment and capital punishment,” he says. “But we have to have certain services in place.”

Teachers are reminding us not only that it is a good place to live where a kid can learn but that virtually every progress society makes comes from investments-- taxes-- made by the public, the community. Despite the swaggering and self-serving narratives of billionaires, no fortune-- not a single one-- is made without passable roads leading to workplaces, the internet (started by government funding), regulations (for example, the rules governing the stock market) and, yes, public schools to educate workers in reading, math and sciences-- all paid for by us, by our taxes.

We want our community to be healthy-- and, so, we have invested in government-funded research in medical technologies and drugs. We want to eat food that won’t poison us-- so, we have built a network of inspectors who make sure contaminated food is kept out of stores and restaurants (and when we cut the inspection regime, more people get sick). We want our community to be safe in their homes, so we make sure the firehouse down the street stays open because though we may never personally need the help, we want to ensure our neighbor can rely on that red truck careening down the street lickety-split, fire hose at the ready, if needed.

In essence, reclaiming the idea that taxes are a good thing isn’t about the specific “services” we individually get. It’s about community itself. And reminding ourselves of its value.

And that’s worth every dollar.

Tom Guild, an educator himself, has to fight a primary runoff (August 28) before he gets to face his reactionary Republicans incumbent, Steve Russell in the Oklahoma City 5th district. Obviously he's watched the Oklahoma teachers movement closely and after he read Jonathan's piece, he reminded me that "In Oklahoma, a spontaneous movement began when a middle school teacher started a group on social media that grew at warp speed. His success was noticed by more traditional players in the education establishment and a teacher walkout ensued. Thousands were gathered at the state capitol grounds for days on end. Many local units had their own tents and infrastructure on the capitol grounds. Tent A housed Edmond teachers, B educators from Oklahoma City, C teachers from Moore, and D a group from Norman. The teachers walked the halls of the state capitol and lobbied state legislators and had a tremendous impact on state politics. Those who had opposed reactionary budget cuts and tax cuts for the wealthy and corporate elitists were galvanized. Teachers had great homemade signs. My favorite was, 'Pluto is still a planet in my school’s textbooks!' A number of incumbent legislators were subsequently defeated or taken to August runoffs in their re-election campaigns. Many of the walking political wounded are Republicans challenged by educators in the nominating process. You can feel change in the air in Oklahoma. The political establishment was trounced in a successful medical marijuana ballot measure that was placed on the primary election ballot, because the Republican establishment was terrified at the prospect of progressives and non-Republican voters marching to the polls in massive numbers in November. As Garth Brooks sang in 'The Dance,' if we knew how it all would end, we’d miss the dance. So far, many Oklahoma voters are dancing to the beat of their own drummer. The incumbent lieutenant governor was denied a place in the Republican runoff when he finished third in a huge field of primary candidates. The first shot has been fired around the state and Oklahoma voters seem to be channeling the classic movie Network saying, we’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore!!"

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.