The National Oil Spill Commission released its report on last year's BP oil spill this week. The report laid out the blame for the spill, tagging each of the three companies working on the Deepwater Horizon at the time, Halliburton, Transocean and BP, and also offered prescriptions for avoiding similar disasters in the future.
"I think the recommendations are pretty tepid given the severity of the crisis," Jackie Savitz, director of pollution campaigns at the advocacy group Oceana, told Sheppard. "Even the small things they're suggesting, I think it's going to be hard to convince Congress to make those changes."
No transparency for you!
Last summer, after the spill, the Obama administration tried hard to look like it was pushing back against the oil industry, even though just weeks before the spill, the president had promised to open new areas of the East Coast to offshore drilling.
This week brought new evidence that, despite some posturing to the contrary, the administration is not exactly unfriendly to the energy industry. One of the key decisions the administration faces about the country's energy future is whether to support the Keystone XL, a pipeline that would pump oil from tar sands in Canada down to Texas refineries. And one of the key lobbyists for TransCanada, the company intending to build the pipeline, is a former staffer for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Friends of the Earth, an environmental group, filed a Freedom of Information requesting correspondence between the lobbyist, Paul Elliott, and his former boss, but the State Department denied the request.
"We do not believe that the State Department has legitimate legal grounds to deny our FOIA request, and assert that the agency is ignoring its own written guidance regarding FOIA requests and the release of public information," said Marcie Keever, the group's legal director, The Michigan Messenger's Ed Brayton reports. "This is the type of delay tactic we would have expected from the Bush administration, not the Obama administration, which has touted its efforts to usher in a new era of transparency in government, including elevated standards in dealing with lobbyists."
Tar sands' black mark
What are the consequences if the government approves the pipeline? As Care2's Beth Buczynski writes, "Communities along the Keystone XL pipeline's proposed path would face increased risk of spills, and, at the pipeline's end, the health of those living near Texas refineries would suffer, as tar sands oil spews higher levels of dangerous pollutants into the air when processed."
What's more, the tar sands extraction process has already brought environmental devastation to the areas like Alberta, Canada, where tar sands mining occurs. Earth Island Journal's Jason Mark recently visited the Oil Sands Discovery Centre in Ft. McMurray, Alberta, which he calls "impressively forthright" in its discussion of the environmental issues brought on by oil sands. (The museum is run by Alberta's provincial government.) Mark reports:
The section on habitat fragmentation was especially good. As one panel put it, "Increasingly, Alberta's remaining forested areas resemble islands of trees in a larger network of cut lines, well sites, mine, pipeline corridors, plant sites, and human settlements. ... Forest disturbances can also encourage increased predation and put some plants and animals at risk."
Not renewable, just new
The museum that Mark visited also made clear that extracting and refining oil from tar sands is a labor-intensive practice. He writes:
Mining, we learn, is just the start. Then the tar has to be "upgraded" into synthetic petroleum via a process that involves "conditioning," "separation" into a bitumen froth, then "deaeration" to take out gases, and finally injection into a dual-system centrifuge that removes the last of the solids. Next comes distillation, thermal conversion, catalytic conversion, and hydrotreating. At that point the recombined petroleum is ready to be refined into gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel. It all felt like a flashback to high school chemistry.
Why bother with this at all? In short, because with easily accessible sources of oil largely tapped out, techniques like tar sands mining and deepwater drilling are the only fonts of oil available. This problem is going to get worse, as The Nation is explaining over the next few weeks in its video series on peak oil.
Energy and the economy
Traditional ideas about energy dictate that even as the world uses up limited resources like oil, technology will create access to new sources, find ways to use limited resources more efficiently, or find ways to consume new sources of energy. These advances will head off any problems with consumption rates. The peak oil theory, on the contrary, argues that it is possible to use up a resource like oil, that there's a peak in supply.
Once the peak has been passed, the consequences, particularly the economic consequences, become dire, as Richard Heinberg, senior fellow with the Post Carbon Institute explains. "If the amount of energy we can use is declining, we may be seeing the end of economic growth as we define it right now," he told The Nation. Watch more below:
Light green
Part of the problem is that the energy resources that could replace fossil fuels like oil-wind and solar energy, for instance-likely won't be in place before the oil wells run dry. And as Monica Potts reports at The American Prospect, our new green economy is getting off to a slow start.
Although the administration has talked incessantly about supporting green jobs, Potts writes that the federal government hasn't even finalized what count as a "green job" yet. The working definition, which is currently under review, asserts that green jobs are in industries that "benefit the environment or conserve national resources" or entails work to green a company's "production process." But what does that actually mean?
"That definition was rightly criticized as overly broad," Potts writes. She continues:
While nearly everyone would include installing solar panels as a green job, what about an architect who designs a green house? (Under the proposed definition, both would count.) ... Another problem comes in weighing green purposes against green execution: We could count, for example, public-transit train operators as green workers. But how do we break down transportation as an industry more broadly? Most would probably agree that truckers who drive tractor-trailers running on diesel fuel wouldn't count as green workers even if they're transporting wind-turbine parts. And many of the jobs we would count as green already exist.
It doesn't exactly inspire confidence that the country is moving swiftly toward a bright green future.
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The milestone of a new year always gets me thinking about both the past and future, and a new decade being upon us makes me do so even more, so I have been thinking a lot about where we were as a country 10 years ago. In January of 2000, things were looking pretty good in comparison to what we are seeing today, and it is pretty stunning how much the landscape has changed. Back then, we had turned a steep deficit earlier in the decade into a large surplus that appeared to be going as far as the eye could see; our country's economy had emerged out of a tough recession in the George HW Bush years into an economy that was producing net new jobs at an average pace of about 3,000,000 a year over the previous several years; poverty rates had been heading down; wage rates for middle class workers had been heading up at the best rate since the 1960s. In terms of foreign affairs, we were at a peace, and the respect we had from other countries was at a high water mark.
Overall, the '90s had been a relatively good decade in American history. There were, however, some seeds that had been planted that would lead to terribly destructive consequences several years down the road. Currency and trade policies were leading to the steady decline in American manufacturing. The telecommunications bill passed in 1996 would lead to a concentration of ownership in media that would be harmful to our democracy. And by far the worst, the repeal of Glass-Steagall, combined with other financial deregulatory measures before and since, would create more damage to our economy than anything other than the Great Depression itself. When George W Bush came into office, these forces of destruction accelerated, and the result is right in front of us.
Only ten years later, it is stunning to see how dramatically different the facts on the ground are today in comparison. It is amazing how much damage can be done to a country as big as this one by a few legislative changes and one stunningly bad President stumbling around for 8 years. Big federal budget surpluses turned into massively big deficits. Instead of 22 million net new jobs in the 8 years before, a net negative new jobs in Bush's 8 years, with bone crunching additional job losses caused by the financial crisis in the first 6 months of Obama's term. Poverty and hunger went way up. Middle class wages and incomes were stagnant. In stark contrast to the 1990s, this last decade has been a wasteland for most of America's workers, with only the biggest players in the financial industry, defense and homeland security contractors, and the highest income earners having been the beneficiaries of the last decade's economic trends.
So much damage has been done to this economy, it is hard to imagine us climbing out of this hole for quite a while, but the question in front of us today is this: can we plant the seeds for a stronger future in the midst of this bad economy in the same fashion that some of the seeds of our economic destruction today were planted in those good years of the 1990s? That should be the defining mission of Democrats and progressives in these challenging days. We should be doing everything possible to help get the economy back on track in the short run, but should keep a strong focus on what will plant those seeds for the future. The bad news, of course, is that the new Republican House has no interest whatsoever in planting those seeds. The good news is that, while it has been easy to miss because Democrats have been so bad about telling people what they have accomplished, there have actually been some strong things done in the last two years that will pay dividends far into the future, including:
1. The investments made in infrastructure through the stimulus and other appropriations, including both traditional kinds like roads and bridges and schools, and more high tech infrastructure like moving toward universal broadband, will pay off for the next 50 years. There should have been more spent on this, far more since this country's infrastructure deficit is huge, but every dollar invested in this is a good thing.
2. Investments in energy conservation through the stimulus and the work that various government agencies are doing will be paying off in many different ways for decades to come, and investment in other kinds of renewable energy will be hugely beneficial as well. Again, there needs to be much more, but what has been done so far is a good start.
3. Making sure women have equal rights when it comes to ensuring they get equal pay through the Lily Ledbetter Act will help a lot of women get better wages.
4. While health care reform will not contain costs as much as it should have because of lacking a public option and the ability to negotiate with drug companies, there are a variety of things done both in health care reform and in addition to it that will help our economy over the long run. More children will get health care coverage, allowing more of them to lead normal productive lives as adults; more preventative care for all our citizens will decrease long term costs and lead to healthier workforces for American companies; more poor people will get care when they need it through Medicaid, keeping many of them from developing long term chronic conditions; tobacco will finally be regulated, meaning less people will get addicted to cigarettes; stem cell research will very likely lead to major breakthroughs that will save money and improve Americans' health overall; insurance companies will have to spend at least 80% of their revenues on actual health care claims, forcing them to keep both their administrative expenses and their out-of-control profit margins down. Most importantly of all, with more health care security available to all our citizens, people won't be locked into jobs they hate for the sake of the health coverage, potentially fostering major amounts of new small businesses and innovation in the American economy.
5. As with the investments made through the stimulus and the changes made through health reform, the financial reform bill passed in 2010 and the credit card reform bill passed in 2009 didn't go nearly far enough, but the positive steps they did take are important. An independent Consumer Financial Products Bureau, along with the credit card reform measures, have the potential to seriously re-structure middle class debt issues in a very positive way. New rules and disclosure on trading are going to be very helpful. Regulating swipe fees on debit cards will be a quick injection of an extra $15 billion a year into the Main Street economy. Auditing the Fed will give us new tools to understand how the banks and the Fed are cutting deals to help Wall St bankers at the expense of everyone else. As with everything else when new legislation passes, how good the regulators are will go a long way in determining how much these new measures actually help middle class and poor families, but the fact that we have finally started the process of tightening regulations on the financial industry after decades of bi-partisan deregulation is important.
The seeds that have been planted in the last two years are not enough to rebuild the forest fire worth of destruction wreaked in recent years. Progressive activists will have to keep working to both keep these seeds from being eaten by Republican and corporate lobbyist animals (to keep torturing the metaphor), and to plant more desperately needed seeds. And the next two years, we will need Obama to use the powers of the executive branch to make more progress even though Republicans in Congress will stop most good legislative initiatives. Most important to our country's hopes for the future, we will need to do what every other major economic power on earth already does, which is to have a well constructed strategy for helping the promising new job producing industries of the future, grow and flourish. We need more money for infrastructure, we need more money for green jobs, we need more programs like the swipe fee regulations that take money out of finance and put it into the Main Street economy- but most of all we need an effective strategy. If we can plant those seeds for the future today, our trajectory over the next 10 years is going to look a lot better than it does after the greed and destruction of the last 10.
Triage is not pretty, but it is designed to save lives. On a battlefield, at a disaster site, or anywhere else that there are multiple victims of natural or unnatural violence, rescue personnel have to make spot decisions about who can and cannot be saved, and much more heartbreakingly, about which of those that can be saved have top priority....
Continued:
Part of the ostensible rationale for President Obama's terrible new tax plan is that it will result in the continued funding of unemployment insurance. Of course, the president himself compared the unemployed to hostages, being held by the Republicans with their economic agenda being the ransom. Embarrassingly, the president said you don't negotiate with hostage-takers unless the hostages might come to harm, which misses the entire point because hostages are by definition at risk of coming to harm. Terrorists don't take hostages and then threaten them with kindness....
[P]erhaps most astonishingly, he also clearly stated that he now expects to be able to trust the hostage-takers to play nicer in the future, as if he hasn't just demonstrated to them a certain means of getting their way. Which is not to play nice. But it gets even worse.
The president's claim that he had to make this deal to keep two million people from losing their unemployment benefits is long on emotion and short on a whole bunch of other things. Define them for yourselves. But even as the president, his staff, and his most ardent and loyal defenders keep pulling on this emotional drawstring, the fallacy of it, the proof that it is but emotional manipulation, stands personified in the two million unemployed who will receive no benefits at all from the president's tax plan. They are the 99ers. They are the people whose 99 weeks of unemployment benefits have run out.
And it ended thus:
Whether or not it is spoken aloud, the lack of help for the 99ers suggests an even graver message. Triage is for disaster zones. And the only possible explanation for leaving the 99ers behind is that somewhere, somehow, consciously or not, a decision may have been based on a dawning realization that outside of Wall Street, the economy is a disaster. And because of that, a further decision has been made that while some may be temporarily economically saved, some won't be. And even worse, the some that won't be will be and are being completely forgotten. And the disaster plan seems to be built around the failed neoliberal economic model of tax and benefit cuts, rather than the traditional and successful Keynesian economic model of direct job creation. Which means we will have a lot more economic triage to come.
All this ought to be obvious. Remember Harvard Law Review? And so if it is not obvious, then it takes a supreme act of will to make it so. But this is how a supposedly "Democratic" Pesident backs himself into abandoning the core of the Democratic Party vision that has defined the party since the dawn of the New Deal. This is no longer the Democratic Party that believes America is for everyone. It is now officially the Republican Party Lite: America is for everyone who can make it, and everyone else is just shit out of luck.
This is not really news coming from the Obama Adminstration. This was the message when he saved Wall Street and the mega-banks, and let tens of millions of families be foreclosed on. It was the message when he slammed the door on single-payer advocates, then scuttled even the public option and signed a bill forcing all Americans to buy health insurance from one of the oligopolies. This was his message: We will take care of the oligopolies, just like the Republicans do. We will try to show them we can do a better job of it than the Republicans can. And unless you make us mad by calling us on what we're doing, we will refrain from calling folks names as we slam the gates in their faces.
Of course this is not the internal dialogue of the Obama Administration: it is the description of what they do, not what they say they are doing.
But what they say they are doing make absolutely no sense. Negotiating with hostage-taking terrorists on the premise that they'll be nicer to the hostages next time?
Seriously. Laurence Lewis is right. That's what the Obama Administration believes. Or at least says that it does. It is, in short, as totally divorced from reason as the real Republican Party is.
There is no arguing with people who think this way, because despite appearances to the contrary, there is no common ground. Oh, they may say, "Water is wet. Surely we can agree on that!" But they also believe that water is not wet. Not when hostages might get hurt. And hostages always might get hurt, because, among other things, they will never go to war with the hostage-takers.
Everyone is talking about what are the Democrats to do. I have been in meetings with a bunch of big donors this week where primarying Obama was an open topic of discussion. I have in front of me a memo from the Third Way arguing that all the President has to do is move to the center, although they don't choose to define what they mean by that in this particular memo- I guess that definition is to come later. I have been hearing from Democrats all over a rising panic that the President will never stand up to Republicans, and we are doomed, doomed, doomed. Well, sit back and relax, friends and neighbors, because it is way too early to panic. Besides, I have thought up the solution to everything.
Before I get to that moment of illumination, though, let me focus first on this new Third Way memo, because as usual, their message is fun to deconstruct. Third Way's entire mission in life is to argue that "the center" is all in American politics, that turning to "the left" is always a mistake, that moderates and independents rule. Virtually every memo they write and every poll they take starts and ends with that premise, and is carefully constructed to drive that point home. In this latest poll/memo, they look at what they call the droppers (the people who voted for Obama but didn't vote this time) and the switchers (the people who say they voted for Obama last time but voted Republican this time). They argue that the droppers are more than the base, and the switchers didn't just switch because of the economy but because they thought Democrats are too liberal.
I want to make a few specific points about the poll before getting to my underlying premise of this post:
1. There are some quirky things about this poll. Unless I looked in depth at the crosstabs and methodology, I can't account for what explains this, but I do know there are some anomalies here. The first is that people frequently misreport who they voted for in the last election, and generally over-report voting for the winner. That could explain some odd data points. For example, 24% of the switchers say they are Republicans who voted for Obama last time and didn't this time. Given that only 9% of Republicans voted for Obama, and 5% of Republicans voted for Democrats this time- that 4% total swing being one of the smallest in any demographic group in this election- to have that big a number of their switchers be Republicans strikes me as hard to believe. Here's another oddity: they say that most of the switchers weren't personally effected much by the economy, but the exit polls said that of the people hardest hit by the economy, Obama had a 42% margin in 2008, while the Republicans captured that group by 29% in 2010. That 71% swing accounted for an overwhelming majority of the swing vote in the exit polls, but the switchers in the Third Way poll seemed to be pretty economically comfortable. I can't account for anomalies like these, other than to suggest that if your entire mission going into a poll is to say Democrats need to move to the center, maybe the methodology and way you phrase the questions makes the numbers a little funky.
2. Here's a classic example of writing the question in a way to achieve a certain result: Third Way asked droppers whether Obama/Democrats "tried to have government do too much" vs. whether they "should have tried to have government do more". I was actually surprised that a plurality of the droppers, 45-39, opted for the latter statement, because it is written to maximize a negative answer. Government as a generic term has a negative cast in American life, and wanting government to do more will always invoke a negative response. Having government invest in, help, have oversight over, create a level playing field, make sure businesses don't cheat, work to create jobs: all of those phrases are automatically more likely to invoke a more positive response than "having government do more" in general. What a plurality in favor of that idea means the droppers really are pretty liberal.
3. Another thing I would note when you are trying so hard to make a certain point is that you tend to blow by inconvenient statistics. For example, in their paragraph on youth voting, the memo points out that youth vote was 12% of the electorate both in 2006 and 2010- therefore, they say, droppers are not disproportionately young. But in everything else, they were comparing droppers and switchers to 2008. The problem for them is that in 2008, young people were 18% of the electorate, so the droppers- as defined the way Third way originally defined them, as the people who voted for Obama in 2008 but did not vote this time- were actually very disproportionately young. I guess that got in the way of their bigger argument, which was that droppers weren't all that progressive, since young people are in fact more progressive on most issues. They also conveniently ignored the big drop as a percentage of the electorate in union members, which are normally almost a quarter of the electorate in midterm elections and were 20% in 2008, but were just 17% this time.
4. A final point: Third Way makes a lot of the independent numbers, including the fact that independents are 40% of the droppers. But when the independents that are coming out are more senior citizens and less young people, who tend to register to vote as indies, the Independents who do vote will be more conservative independents, and the ones who don't vote- your droppers- will be more progressive. There are lots of progressive indies who tend to align with base Democrats on issues, and they include many young people and union members, precisely the indies who didn't vote in this election.
Here is where I do agree with Third Way: the swing voters in the last two elections, the "switchers", tend to be middle and working class voters. They do instinctively worry about government being too big and about deficit spending in general. But as I noted in a post shortly after the election, these working and middle class swing voters are also strongly populist:
• Swing voters supported a message about challenging China on trade, ending subsidies to corporations that send jobs overseas, and stopping NAFTA-like trade deals over a message about increasing exports, passing more trade agreements, and getting government out of the way by 59-28
• Swing voters supported a message about ending tax cuts for those making over $250,0000 a year, adding a bank tax to curb speculative trading, cutting wasteful military spending and ending subsidies to oil companies over a message about cutting 100 billion dollars from domestic programs, raising the Social Security retirement age, and turning Medicare into a voucher program by 51-37
• Swing voters supported a statement about politicians keeping their hands off Social Security and Medicare over a statement about raising the retirement age by 62-36
• 89% of swing voters supported a statement about full disclosure of campaign donations and limiting the power of lobbyists
• 90% of swing voters supported a statement about cracking down on outsourcing and creating jobs by fixing schools, sewers, and roads in disrepair
• Even when framed in direct opposition to a statement about stopping increasing government spending and tax increases, swing voters said they were more worried that we will fail to make the investments we need to create jobs and strengthen the economy by 54-44
Which brings me to the solution all of you have been waiting: how can Obama and the Democrats regain the mystical center? How can the President accomplish that while avoiding a primary? How can he show strength when so many Democrats are worried about how strong he is? It really is quite easy: the mystical center is also where the disaffected base resides. Obama doesn't have to choose. Both swing voters and the Democratic base want the President to stand up to Wall Street on behalf of main street. They both want him to fight to create new jobs, especially manufacturing jobs. They both want him to say yes to middle class tax cuts and no to tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires. They want him to say no raising the retirement age and cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits.
I don't know what Third Way will say the center is when their next memo comes out, but I can say right now: the center has nothing to do with what Washington elites say it is. The center and progressives want exactly the same thing: for the president to focus on helping the middle class weather this economic storm. The answer to the President's political problems is really pretty simple: he just has to say no to the DC establishment, to the bank lobbyists and pundits yammering at him to just give in to the Republican demands. He has to stand tall for the middle class, and his political problems will resolve themselves.
I was going to call this post Revolt of the Screwed, but decided that I didn't want to get readers who were looking for porn sites. However, that is a good summary of what happened in the election: the middle class voters most hurt by this terrible recession turned against the Democrats with a vengeance. They were looking for someone to blame for their economic woes. The good news is that their first pick was Wall Street. The bad news for Democrats is that they associated Obama with Wall Street. The two most important and dramatic statistics coming out of the exit polling were (1) the 40% of voters who felt worse off economically in the last couple of years went Republican by 29% after going for Obama in 2008 by 42%; and (2) the 35% of voters who said Wall Street was more to blame than anyone else for the bad economy broke 56-42 for the Republicans. That first number is the biggest swing by far in any demographic group I have ever seen after looking at exit poll numbers for the past 25 years. I have seen swings in the 30s before, maybe even into the low 40s in some small segment of the electorate once or twice, but I have never seen anything close to a 71% swing before.
I wrote early in 2009 that voters were going to be in a very bad mood in November of 2010, and that this would be a blame election, where economically stressed swing voters would be wanting to take their misery out on someone. I was certainly right about that, but here's the ironic thing: I suggested that since I thought it was unlikely we could get them to blame the economy on Bush since we were in charge now, that our best hope was to get them to blame it on Wall Street. They did, that 35% who laid the blame on Wall Street's door were primarily the middle class swing voter bloc in this election, but they associated us Democrats and Obama with Wall Street more than Republicans. The TARP bailout and Obama and Geithner's vigorous defense of it, the kid glove treatment of the big banks at the hands of Geithner, the AIG and big bank bonuses that closely followed, the failure to prosecute or break up the Too Big To Fail banks: it all came together in those angry middle class voters' minds as Obama being associated with the same Wall Street actors people were blaming for their economic problems. The fact that once the financial reform bill that had some important wins for the middle class was passed, Democrats barely ever talked about it again didn't help.
So now that this election from hell is over, the question is how do Obama and the Democrats come back in 2012. There's a lot of talk about moving to the center, but what does that even mean? When Washingtonians talk about the center, they tend to mean cutting Social Security and doing trade deals, but what do the economically stressed swing voters who turned against Democrats mean by the center? Well, these voters have very strong feelings about certain issues, and they don't tend to track with what pundits in DC talk about much. Check out these numbers from a Stan Greenberg poll done for the Campaign for America's Future. Stan did a careful analysis of which voters were the key swing voters, and what he found is striking:
Swing voters supported a message about challenging China on trade, ending subsidies to corporations that send jobs overseas, and stopping NAFTA-like trade deals over a message about increasing exports, passing more trade agreements, and getting government out of the way by 59-28
Swing voters supported a message about ending tax cuts for those making over $250,0000 a year, adding a bank tax to curb speculative trading, cutting wasteful military spending and ending subsidies to oil companies over a message about cutting 100 billion dollars from domestic programs, raising the Social Security retirement age, and turning Medicare into a voucher program by 51-37
Swing voters supported a statement about politicians keeping their hands off Social Security and Medicare over a statement about raising the retirement age by 62-36
89% of swing voters supported a statement about full disclosure of campaign donations and limiting the power of lobbyists
90% of swing voters supported a statement about cracking down on outsourcing and creating jobs by fixing schools, sewers, and roads in disrepair
Even when framed in direct opposition to a statement about stopping increasing government spending and tax increases, swing voters said they were more worried that we will fail to make the investments we need to create jobs and strengthen the economy by 54-44
The voters who were the swing voters in this electorate, the ones who supported Republicans this time but generally supported Obama and Democrats the last time, are the economically hurting middle class- the ones most worried about their jobs, most stressed about their mortgages being underwater or close to it, and most squeezed by stagnant wages. They blame Wall Street for the financial crisis, they strongly dislike outsourcing and "NAFTA-like" trade deals, they favor higher taxes on the wealthy and speculative trading, they don't want Social Security or Medicare benefits cut or the retirement age raised, they think infrastructure jobs ought to be created by the government, and they hate corporate special interest lobbying and money. These voters are the populists who Lee Atwater focused on in 1988, and the middle class populists we ought to be focused on now. The reason they are swing voters is that they think both parties- and yes, government itself- have let them down. They don't like partisan bickering because they want politicians to focus on their needs instead of trying to keep their own jobs, but they have no patience for bi-partisan deals that once again screw them on these economic issues.
The only way President Obama and other Democrats will win in 2012 is by focusing on improving the economic lives of these stressed out voters, and by doing it now. That means first and foremost dealing with the foreclosure crisis and underwater mortgages, and having DOJ actually start prosecuting these bankers who have so clearly violated the law. It means re-orienting government contracts to ones that really will buy American goods and pay a decent wage doing it. It means aggressively using executive orders to spur new manufacturing jobs. And it means eagerly picking some fights with Republicans over these middle class issues.
The election numbers could not be clearer: the voters we need to focus on are the folks who feel the weight of this damaged economy on every muscle of their tired shoulders. And those are the people our policies ought to be focused anyway, so it is a twofer: it's the right thing to do and the best way to win the election.
There's all the usual post-election palaver that happens after a Democratic loss: Republican and right wing triumphalism, the pro-corporate wing of the Democratic party and conventional wisdom pundits arguing that Democrats should "turn to the center" (by which they mean the Washington center- cutting Social Security, doing more trade deals, not antagonizing Wall Street- as opposed to what the center is for voters), and progressives arguing that Obama should stand strong on Democratic values and not cave to the Republican agenda. There's also a classic dynamic where some Democrats are urgently calling on people not to attack each other or the President, to try to keep the party from looking like it is in disarray, and others wanting to really engage in that old centrist versus left debate and critique.
I have been thinking hard about all this in part because it's the obvious thing everyone is thinking and talking about and in part because I am doing a lot of panels and media interviews right now- the latest one yesterday at Harvard where I did left-right panel with Bill Kristol on analyzing the elections. Interestingly, while Kristol and I naturally disagreed on the substance and political dynamics on many key issues- Afghanistan, tax cuts for the rich, health care among the big ones that came up- we agreed on the essential point that Obama can only survive by reconnecting with both the Democratic base and working class swing voters by being more populist on jobs, banking issues, and Social Security/Medicare (Republicans get honest while speaking academically in the weeks immediately after the elections- like Lee Atwater, also speaking at Harvard after the 1988 election, Kristol agreed that the swing vote in national elections is a working class populist vote).
At the end of the day, though, I keep coming back to one thing. Political positioning is significant, and I continue to believe populist rhetoric and substance on issues helps. Energizing the base and doing more to turn out Democratic base voters in 2012 will be important. But ultimately there will be only one way for Obama and the Democrats to come back in 2012, and that is for the economy to be substantially better. The thing Washington insiders always seem to glide over is the level of economic pain that is out there. The real unemployment rate is far higher than the official numbers because they don't include part time and temporary workers still looking for full time jobs as well as those who are too discouraged to look for work. Incomes have been flat while a lot of every day costs for things like groceries, gas and utilities, health care, and college tuition are a lot higher than they were a few years ago. Pensions and savings wiped out by the stock market collapse still haven't recovered for most people. And the housing crisis- 25% or more of homeowners are in real trouble, and housing prices are staying down- looms like a massive New York skyscraper towering over everything else.
Traditional Democratic ideas around Keynesian solutions for jumpstarting the economy, which we tried some of but not nearly enough, are politically dead with the incoming Congress. That means there is only one thing that will help revive this economy right now, and give working class homeowners some tangible benefits: getting these underwater mortgages written down so that people can stay in their homes. It is the only thing that will stabilize the housing market, and the only major lift to the economic well being of middle class voters. It will mean the big banks taking a big hit financially, but not many folks will shed a lot of tears about that. And here's the deal: Treasury, Federal Housing Administration, other regulators, and the Justice Department can make this happen without Congress doing a thing (which they won't). It would mean a big shift in administration policy, but I have come to believe it is the one thing that they can clearly do to give a major boost to the economic fortunes of the stressed out middle class. And if they do it, I hope they do it fullout, not by muddling through.
The political urgency of this is shown by the two most important statistics that explain the fate of Democrats on Tuesday are these:
-In 2008, Obama won the votes of people who said their personal economic situation had gotten worse by a 43% margin. In 2010, Democrats lost those voters by 29%. By the way, the number who said things were worse for them? 40%. That is an incredibly big swing in such a massive slice of the electorate, one on a scale that I don't remember in 25 years of looking at exit polls.
-People were asked by exit pollsters who they most blamed for the bad economy. Obama was only third on that list with 24%, while Bush was actually higher with 29%. Pretty much everyone who said Obama voted Republican, and everyone who said Bush voted Democratic. But the number one culprit on the list, the one that working class swing votes landed on, was Wall Street, at 35%. Guess who that swing group blaming Wall Street? Yup, the Republicans won 56% of their votes. Pretty ironic: these voters get right who was most to blame for our economic problems, but they don't feel like Obama has done enough about setting things right.
Better positioning, turning out base voters, having a unified party effort: it's all great. But Barack Obama will not win in 2012 unless he brings back the voters who turned against him in the two statistics above (which obviously were mainly overlapping voters). He won't win without reviving the economy at least to some extent, and that won't happen with another stimulus: it will have to happen by going to the heart of the problem, which is the housing market. This debate we are about to have on the foreclosure issue because of the problems the big banks created is actually an opportunity for Democrats to seize the initiative. They can take dramatic and effective action without having to do anything with the new Congress. It is the best thing they can do for themselves politically and economically. Let's hope they are bold and aggressive in fighting for the middle class on this issue.
It's not just DADT, of course. It could be said about everything that Barack Obama has promised the Democratic base. But it's just become much clearer about DADT with the recent court decisions. Here's the last 2/3rds or so of Maddow's closing comment from last night, and it very clearly cuts through the customary double-speak of the Obama Administration and its apologists (transcript below):
Here's the thing. The White House line, the line from the administration on this now is that they'd like the Senate to repeal it. Absent that action, the spokesman said, absent that action, absent the Senate voting to repeal it, absent the moon crashing through the atmosphere and turning us all to green cheese--absent that action of the Senate repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell, the White House says there is an orderly process underway to get rid of the policy. And that orderly process is that the Senate will repeal it?
The White House is assuring everyone that the policy will end. And when you drill down on how they say it will end, they say it will end because the Senate will end it. Even though the Senate has just chosen not to end it and the Senate is poised to get more conservative not less in the imminent elections.
This is incoherence.
Outserve, the underground network of gay service personnel has reported there's a widespread perception in the military in the wake of the ruling that the court ruling against the policy yesterday means the policy is over. Service members, legal defense network has set up a website sldn.org/stillatrisk to warn the members of military to not come out that the policy is still in effect. We were told anyone coming out in the military now is absolute absolutety still at risk of being fired for doing so. It is not over.
The policy is still in effect. and the plan from the White House for ending it is apparently to count on the United States Senate to do the right thing. That's the plan.
An expert on the issue at UC Santa Barbara told the New York Times today, the thing that everybody else is dancing around and unwilling to admit. That unless the President declines to appeal the ruling in Republicans versus the United States, the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy probably will remain law for years. He's right, unless you believe the U.S. Senate is going to do the right thing.
This year with John McCain still there and a slate of Republican Senate candidates that includes an activist against women even serving in the military, who once toured the country promoting the idea that being gay is curable--You know, like as if it's athlete's foot or something-Unless you believe that the United States Senate after this year's elections is going to do the right thing by gay service members-Ha!--then the decision by the Obama Administration whether or not to appeal this ruling is likely a decision between killing this policy, now, and letting it survive probably forever.
This is not the conclusion i expected to reach after today's reporting on this subject and after today's interviews. Everybody says the Justice Department appealing this ruling is an inevitability. It does not have to be. It is not inevitable. If the Administration believes the law is unconstitutional, there is precedent that supports the administration not appealing it and letting the law die. An orderly time frame for the death of a law can be arranged with the court.
I hereby declare that i will never get another callback in Washington ever again for putting it this way to you. but it is the way it is. A plan that has no chance of becoming reality is not a real plan. No matter how much you say it is. you can either end it or you can stop saying you will. Thank you.
The Obama Adminstration is as deeply embedded in doublespeak as the Bush Administration ever was. We are being lied to, pure and simple. And Maddow is calling them out for it.
The guest piece below from my friend Leo Hindery shows why he would be a great chair for the National Economic Council. He has been a consistently strong advocate for a trade and manufacturing policy that puts the interests of American workers ahead of those companies getting rich by outsourcing their factories to China. -Mike
After three decades of double-digit growth, China has just passed Japan to become the world's second-largest economy behind only the United States - and it should surpass us as early as 2030. And when China wins in trade, as it now does every day, it's really only the U.S. which loses. In fact, for the last several years the correlation has been almost dollar for dollar, with America's trade deficit with China in goods and services virtually mirroring China's overall trade surplus.
This should be enough of a clarion call to the administration to demand the integrated all-of-government approach to our trade relations with China that is the only one which is going to address the economic nightmare we find ourselves in with that country. Yet the realities around our trade with China trade continue to worsen - and become a whole lot more foreboding.
Back in May 2009, in a speech I gave in Qatar, I predicted that as an extension of its ever-growing trading and geopolitical status, China would soon accelerate (and relatively soon complete) its deployment of a full-scale "blue water navy." I felt that once China has this force in place and is able to readily project power throughout the Pacific and as far as the Indian Ocean, there will be, into the long term, regional and global tensions of a magnitude not seen since the Cold War. I also felt there would soon be great pressure on Japan to re-militarize, given that a massive 86% of its oil & gas needs are met by Middle East suppliers by way of the Indian Ocean.
This past April 2010, the New York Times also began to write about China's military's initiative that is now called "far sea defense", which China has publicly confirmed is fully intended to project naval power well beyond the Chinese coast. China has been testing long-range ballistic missiles that could be used against our aircraft carriers, it intends to deploy their own aircraft carrier group 'within a few years', and its naval forces already stand at 275 "principal combatants" - i.e., major warships - and more than 60 submarines, including at least two Jin-class submarines with ballistic missile capabilities, with two more under construction, and two Shang-class nuclear-powered attack submarines.
So, what do you do if you suddenly have a 'blue water navy'? Well, you use the bloody thing, which is exactly what China is already doing in the South China Sea, where it's just said it will tolerate no interference in what it now believes to be a "core interest" of its sovereignty, on par with Taiwan and Tibet. And by making the South China Sea sovereignty issue 'non-negotiable', imminent problems now exist between China and each of Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei.
(As the Obama Administration seeks to "normalize" the criminal practices of the Bush Administration, it seems that it may have a LITTLE problem with international law... - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
On Saturday, the New York Times reported that administration officials are "alarmed" by the military commission case of Omar Khadr, the Canadian citizen seized as a 15-year-old by U.S. forces in Afghanistan who's now spent a third of his life in the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay. Trying an alleged child soldier based largely on confessions he made after being threatened with gang-rape and murder is not the case the Obama administration had hoped to showcase in its first military commission trial.
But the argument in a new paper published today by Loyola Law School professor David Glazier should give the administration even more cause for alarm. Glazier, an expert on international law and the laws of armed conflict, argues that the military commission trial of Omar Khadr is itself a war crime.
Greg Sargent, Political Wire, and others have cited numbers from Public Policy Polling to argue that President Obama's approval ratings among self-identified liberals remain quite high. According to PPP, President Obama's job performance among self-identified liberals is still a robust 85%.
However, there is a serious flaw in citing these numbers: they are only based on a subsample of between 125-130, which gives them a margin of error of plus or minus 8.9%. That is, they are only based on a subsample of 125-130 registered voters if PPP's new national survey is anything like their national survey from last month, when 19% of their overall sample of 667 voters self-identified as liberal.
By way of comparison, across the last four Gallup weekly approval polls, which have a combined sample of 14,346 respondents, President Obama's job performance among self-identified liberals has only averaged 74%. With Gallup identifying 20% of the electorate as liberal so far in 2010, that would mean a liberal subsample of 2,869, that would mean a margin of error of only 1.8%. That makes the Gallup numbers far, far more reliable than the PPP numbers.
Looking across all other job performance polls taken over the past month, only one organization, YouGov, produced crosstabs based strictly on ideological self-identification. There are literally no other polls that released such crosstabs-only PPP, Gallup and YouGov.
Across 899 self-identified liberals surveyed in their last four polls, YouGov's does show President Obama's approval rating at 84%. That number is much closer to PPP's result than to Gallup's. Also, the subsample only has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.3%, which means that random error alone cannot account for the difference between the Gallup and YouGov numbers. Further, both Gallup and YouGov are sampling "all adults," and cell-phone onlys, so the difference cannot be found there either. That YouGov is conducted over the Internet might be causing problems, but Polimetrix, which actually conducts the YouGov polls, actually has a decent track record.
So, where does Obama's approval actually stand among self-identified liberals? While PPP's sample size is too small to be taken seriously, it would be unwise to look for "The One, True Poll," and completely ignore either YouGov or Gallup, both of which have good sample sizes. Personally, I am a big believer in simple poll averaging as a way of providing an accurate snapshot of electoral preference, and the numbers back me up on that belief. I see no reason why simple poll averaging can't be applied in this situation as well, which would peg President Obama's approval rating among self-identified liberals at around 79-80%.
Those are not very good numbers for President Obama among self-identified liberals. However, they are too be expected given his overall approval rating of 44.6%, which is itself not a very good rating. Also, until the Obama administration and Congressional Democrats start passing public policy that has a more immediate, positive impact on the lives of most Americans, it is unlikely that this rating will improve. That is the case no matter the "political reality," and no matter much anyone sneers, or does not sneer, at progressives.
The press secretary dismissed the "professional left" in terms very similar to those used by their opponents on the ideological right, saying, "They will be satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare and we've eliminated the Pentagon. That's not reality."
Of those who complain that Obama caved to centrists on issues such as healthcare reform, Gibbs said: "They wouldn't be satisfied if Dennis Kucinich was president."(...)
Progressives, Gibbs said, are the liberals outside of Washington "in America," and they are grateful for what Obama has accomplished in a shattered economy with uniform Republican opposition and a short amount of time.
Oy, on many levels.
If the White House really doesn't think it has any problems among self-identified liberals or progressives, and that all the complaints are coming from a grasstop elite, it needs to look at the data again. From 2008 to 2010, President Obama has suffered far more erosion of support among self-identified liberals than among self-identified moderates or conservatives:
In 2008, according to exit polls, 89% self-identified liberals voted for President Obama. Over the past four weeks, according to Gallup, President Obama's approval rating among self-identified liberals has averaged 74%. That is a decline of 15 points.
In 2008, according to exit polls, 60% of self-identified moderates voted for President Obama. Over the past four weeks, according to Gallup, President Obama's approval rating among self-identified moderates has averaged 54%. That is a decline of 6 points.
In 2008, according to exit polls, 20% of self-identified conservatives voted for President Obama. Over the past four weeks, according to Gallup, President Obama's approval rating has averaged 24% among self-identified conservatives. That is an increase of 4 points.
So, according to Gallup, disapproval among self-identified liberals accounts for the majority of President Obama's approval rating underperformance compared to his 2008 vote share (from the perspective that the smaller decline among moderates is partially canceled out by the small gain among conservatives). If it were not for President Obama's decline among liberals, there would be virtually no difference between his 2010 approval rating and 2008 voter performance.
Maybe the White House knows that its problem among self-identified liberals is not confined to the grasstops. Maybe it is "reaching out" to liberals in this insulting manner because it figures that while it has lost more support among liberals than among any other group, those liberals are still going to vote Democratic anyway.
For years, Internet advocates have warned of the doomsday scenario that will play out on Monday: Google and Verizon will announce a deal that the New York Times reports "could allow Verizon to speed some online content to Internet users more quickly if the content's creators are willing to pay for the privilege."
The deal marks the beginning of the end of the Internet as you know it. Since its beginnings, the Net was a level playing field that allowed all content to move at the same speed, whether it's ABC News or your uncle's video blog. That's all about to change, and the result couldn't be more bleak for the future of the Internet, for television, radio and independent voices.
How did this happen? We have a Federal Communications Commission that has been denied authority by the courts to police the activities of Internet service providers like Verizon and Comcast. All because of a bad decision by the Bush-era FCC. We have a pro-industry FCC Chairman who is terrified of making a decision, conducting back room dealmaking, and willing to sit on his hands rather than reassert his agency's authority. We have a president who promised to "take a back seat to no one on Net Neutrality" yet remains silent. We have a congress that is nearly completely captured by industry. Yes, more than half of the US congress will do pretty much whatever the phone and cable companies ask them to. Add the clout of Google, and you have near-complete control of Capitol Hill.----Josh Silver, august 5th, 2010
It would truly be a grotesque irony if the greatest phenomenon in favor of democratized, bottom-up change in history--the network neutral internet--was destroyed under the administration that has consistently sold itself as the most democratized, bottom-up, grassroots-friendly White House in history. But, we are on the brink of seeing exactly that happen.
The Obama administration's endless dithering and insatiable desire to not appear--or be--confrontational toward corporate America and other status-quo institutions is about to allow the Internet to become a top-down, corporate captured medium. The wealthiest corporations will be able to shut out bottom-up, grassroots institutions that are outside their control. And, they will vastly enrich themselves in the process.
The Internet is the most democratized media in the history of the world. It is the largest repository of cultural production ever created. Both of these are only possible because everyone who has access to the Internet has the same production and distribution options as everyone else. This deal between Verizon and Google would end that, once and for all, by allowing the wealthiest, most powerful corporations to have the best channels of production and distribution, while everyone else gets crumbs or worse.
This is going to happen unless the Obama administration and the FCC prevent it. And they CAN prevent it. Unfortunately, they are more interested in not taking any confrontational stance at all, and are working to outline a "third way" on Net Neutrality even as the Google Verizon deal unfolds.
Although, I suppose on the plus side for the Obama administration, they won't have to worry about hearing about complaints from annoying bloggers anymore, since it could become almost impossible to get our websites to load.
Addressing a group of civil rights leaders and advocates at this week's meeting of the Urban League, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan accused people who criticize his Race to the Top grants and other education policies of being "intentionally misleading or profoundly misinformed." As highlighted by Paul here at Open Left the other day, President Obama immediately reinforced the message by scolding critics of his education reforms for making "a fuss" over something that shouldn't be seen as "controversial." Then, to complete the triumvirate, the supposed progressives at the Center for American Progress castigated Congress and anyone else who would dare lay a finger on the Obama administration's Race to the Top and other "reforms."
As Paul explained yesterday, what's seldom discussed - not only among leaders of the Democratic party but also in the progressive community - is the actual "evidence" for and against the dangerous proposals being championed by those who consider themselves to be "on the left" of America's political spectrum. Instead people on the left are generally in denial about issues of race and class that are at the heart of the matter. And educators themselves are being played for suckers by the Democratic establishment.
Nowhere was this situation more painfully obvious to me than at last week's Netroots Nation conference in Las Vegas. As lots of lip service was being paid to "saving teachers' jobs," not much of anything in the agenda addressed the destructive education policies of the Obama administration. Of course, lots of presenters had high-minded declarations about the importance of schools to democracy and the progressive cause. But no one had anything particularly progressive to say about the direction of school reform.
As news came out during the conference that another 241 teachers were being fired by Washington, DC's autocratic chancellor Michele Rhee for being "ineffective," no one of any prominence at the meeting pointed out the blatant unfairness of the Obama administration's push to evaluate teachers on the basis of students' scores on standardized tests.
In fact, an attendee I was having coffee with as the news broke was absolutely gleeful about it. "There are too many bad teachers," she explained to me while coolly scrolling through the headlines on her Blackberry, "And they're never made accountable for anything."
At the conference's Education Caucus, which all too symbolically never made it to the final agenda distributed to attendees as they arrived, educators exhorted the progressive blogosphere to push politicians in DC to pass the "edujobs" bill to save hundreds of thousand of teaching positions, a prospect, by the way, that seemed incredibly remote even as the declarations were being made.
The NEA's terrific spoksperson Lily Eskelsen informed the caucus crowd about the vagaries of for-profit education entrepreneurs, the creeping corporate influence on local schools, and out of control charters. And D Kos education blogger annie em backed her up with information about the corrupt Imagine charter schools chain. Yet in the ensuing discussion, a frontpage blogger from MotherTalkers (sorry, didn't get your name) explained how much her audience "like charter schools."
So as the rest of Netroots Nation rolled along on the general affirmations of the first year-and-a-half of the Obama presidency, all of us who care about public schools were left talking among ourselves about the abyss that we all too clearly see our country's school children heading toward.
The President's failure to make these nominations and secure their confirmation in a timely manner will, in retrospect, prove to have been his biggest mistake.
This is certainly possible. The President's failure to change the culture at the Fed by filling these vacancies earlier may well prove to be his biggest mistake. The dire condition of the economy is by far the top political problem facing the Obama administration.
But really, going back further, not allowing Republicans to destroy the filibuster back in 2005 is the biggest mistake made by not only President Obama, but by the Democratic trifecta as a whole (and, I admit, my biggest mistake too). This would have resulted in a wide swatch of changes, including a larger stimulus, the Employee Free Choice Act, a better health bill (in all likelihood, one with a public option, and completed in December), an actual climate / energy bill, a second stimulus, and more. If Democrats had tacked on other changes to Senate rules that sped up the process, such as doing away with unanimous consent, ending debating time after cloture is achieved on nominations, eliminating the two days between filing for cloture and voting on cloture, and restricting quorum calls, then virtually every judicial and administration vacancy would already be filled, as well.
Playing the "what if" game can be painful, because there is no way to go back in time and change what happened. However, it is also useful in that it gives us a roadmap on how to do better in the future. In this case, that means focusing our efforts on changing Senate rules for the next Congress. Right now, it is hard to imagine any more important effort in order to achieve more effective governance.
Remember last year, when it seemed so funny that no elected Republican leader could stand up and contradict Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck? Well, it's not so funny now that Obama & his adminstration have gone one better: the mere prospect that they'll be lambasted by Glenn Beck is all that's needed to whip them into line.
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