Obama’s Remaining Three Years

The President has been reported as conceding in private that he can’t get anything through Congress and that he doesn’t expect anything to change during the next three years. Being conciliatory hasn’t worked and using the “bully pulpit” hasn’t worked either. Just this week, 90% of the Republicans in the Senate voted against something – background checks for gun sales – that 90% of the public supports. As Bill Maher pointed out, people who couldn’t pass a background check are for them. But not congressional Republicans. And even if this pathetically weak bill had squeaked through the Senate, it would have died in the Republican-controlled House.

So my question for President Obama is this: Why are you only saying this in private? Why not make the Republicans’ obstruction of government a big, public issue and tell the public what you are going to do about it?

I frankly don’t know what can be done; maybe if LBJ were still alive, he would know. Isn’t there someone with deep political experience and wisdom who can tell Obama how to put the fear of God – or at least the fear of the President – in congressional Republicans? But if Obama can’t get anything from the Republicans, he should do whatever he can do without Congress. I have some suggestions:

• Fire Eric Holder. Here’s an Attorney General who wastes resources prosecuting the War on Drugs against pot users, but won’t sue the banks that raped the country because they’re too big! Make Elliot Spitzer head of a Task Force to clean up the banking industry and put the likes of Jamie Ruben and Lloyd Blankfein in jail. Tell the Justice Department to enforce the Antitrust Laws and crack down on big money tax cheats.
• End The War On Drugs. Stop wasting resources chasing medicinal marijuana dispensers. Obama smoked a lot of weed in his day and knows it is no more a threat to America than a couple of margaritas at the end of the week. Why should the President allow hundreds of thousands of Americans to have their lives ruined by a criminal justice system that arrests and prosecutes them for doing what the President did for years?
• Prohibit The Introduction Of Chemicals And Genetically Modified Organisms Into The Environment Unless They Are Proven To Be Harmless. Currently, the burden is on the government to prove chemicals and GMOs harmful before banning or regulating them. This is bass-ackwards. We are poisoning our children. Use the EPA to combat Monsanto and its ilk.
• End Fracking. The evidence is piling up that fracking doesn’t just inject harmless chemicals into the earth where they disappear. Fracking is poisoning our water tables and sickening those who live nearby.
• Prohibit The Routine Administration Of Antibiotics To Cattle. We are also poisoning ourselves with drugs and chemicals by creating bacteria in beef that are immune from antibiotics. Those of us who eat that beef from cattle that are treated like this are gradually losing the protection provided by antibiotics.
• Make Refinancing Of Mortgages A Routine Matter. Anyone who is current on his/her mortgage should be allowed to refinance at today’s low rates without all the bullshit and expense. Since banks can borrow from the government at an interest rate of roughly ZERO, they should be forced to lend to homeowners as a condition of being able to continue borrowing from the government. The relief felt by mortgage holders and the amount of new money injected into the system would jump-start the economy.
• Pressure Harry Reid To Invoke The Nuclear Option To Allow Your Executive And Judicial Appointees To Be Confirmed. Obama can’t staff his commissions or his executive departments. Some commissions and agencies are prohibited from acting without a chairperson and the Republicans in the Senate routinely block the confirmation of new department or commission heads. More than 12% of the federal judgeships are vacant and cannot be filled because of the Senate Republicans’ routine filibustering of nearly every Obama appointment. What kind of legacy is that? Obama must act now, since there’s no guarantee that the Democratic majority in the Senate will exist after the 2014 election.

There must be other things Obama can accomplish by executive action or Executive Orders. He should get on with them.

State Of The Union Address

President Obama’s State of the Union Address is scheduled for February 12. Since Americans don’t like to hear bad news and are heavily invested in the concept of “American Exceptionalism”, I imagine the President will emphasize our strengths, identify areas where we’ve made progress since retrieving the White House from the catastrophe that was the Bush-Cheney Administration, and talk about potential and opportunity – what we can achieve if we all work together. But if we are honest with ourselves, we must acknowledge that the state of our union leaves a lot to be desired. What follows, in list format, are some of the strengths and weaknesses of our union.

Strengths

1. The largest economy in the world.
2. The largest and most powerful military in the world.
3. Most of the great universities of the world (29 of the top 50, according to one report.)

Weaknesses

1. A dysfunctional political system under which:
   • One party, the Republican Party, no longer believes in government and devotes its energy to making sure
     government doesn’t work and to procedural gimmicks (like gerrymandering and restricted voting hours)
     to disenfranchise Democrats and suppress their ability to vote
   • A minority of Republican legislators have the power to thwart the wishes of the majority and to block the
     appointment of judges and members of the executive branch so as to prevent government from
     functioning
   • More than 30,000 lobbyists in Washington “persuade”, i.e., bribe, legislators to deregulate
     industry and Wall Street, with disastrous for our physical and financial health and for the
     environment
   • Our Supreme Court is controlled by an activist conservative majority motivated by ideology rather
     than the rule of law.
2. The worst trade balance in the developed world.
3. The largest debt of any nation in the world.
4. The lowest life expectancy of the advanced democracies.*
5. The highest obesity rate.*
6. The highest rate of deaths from car accidents and violence.*
7. The highest infant mortality rate.*
8. The poorest health throughout life.*
9. The highest rate of diabetes (ages 15-24).*
10. The highest rate of hospital admissions from asthma.*
11. The highest poverty rate.* (As of 2011, 46.2 million Americans lived in poverty and 49.9 million were without health insurance.)
12. The highest rate of teenage pregnancies;
13. The highest rate of child poverty.*
14. A rank of third from last in children age 3-5 enrolled in pre-school.*
15. Low rankings of 15 year olds for these countries* in 2006 in Reading – last; Science – fifth from last; Math – third from last.
16. The highest rate of incarceration in the world and more people incarcerated than any other country in the world.
17. The highest number of deaths from firearms in the world – approximately 30,000 per year. (Since 1979, more than 119,000 children and teenagers have died from gun violence – more than all the U.S. military personnel killed in all our wars since 1965.)
18. The most oil consumption in the world – more than China, Japan, Russia, Germany and India combined.
19. The most carbon dioxide emissions in the world – more than China, India and Russia combined. As a consequence, global warming has continued with resulting catastrophic heat waves, droughts and storms.
20. The 23rd best infrastructure in the world.
21. A “social justice” ranking of 27th of 31 among economically developed countries, defined as the “ability of each individual to participate in the market society, regardless of social status.”
22. Increasing inequality resulting in the largest gap between rich and poor since 1929.

___________________________________
*Switzerland, Australia, Japan, Sweden, Italy, Canada, Norway, Netherlands, Finland, Spain, United Kingdom, France, Austria, Germany, Denmark, Portugal and the United States per 2013 Report of the National Institute of Health.

Strengths or Weaknesses, Depending On Your Perspective

1. More defense expenditures than the rest of the world combined.
2. The highest rate of firearms ownership (more than 300 million in a country of just over 300 million people.)*
3. The most international weapons sales – 78% of world total in 2011. ($66.3 billion; Russia was second at $4.8 billion.)
4. A shrinking middle class, whose income has dropped since 1980, while the income and wealth of the top 1% has skyrocketed.
5. Arrests for marijauna possession exceed arrests for violent crime (663,032 vs. 534,704 for 2011.)
6. The most religious economically developed country in the world.

At the risk of blasphemy, it must be noted that much of America’s decline can be connected to Reaganism (“government doesn’t solve problems; government IS the problem”) and Reaganomics (the fraudulent “trickle-down” theory rightly described by George H. W. Bush as “voodoo” economics.) But you knew I’d say that, didn’t you.

Make The Case, Mr. President

After having had virtually nothing to say publicly on the Debt Ceiling negotiations, President Obama finally held a press conference – his first in more than three months. He said that the deal being negotiated to get Repubican support for raising the Debt Ceiling couldn’t consist entirely of spending cuts; some increase in revenues would have to be part of the deal. But Obama implied that he had already acquiesced to Repubican demands that no tax increases be part of the deal, and he plaintively argued that he was only proposing “to get rid of tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires; tax breaks for oil companies and hedge fund managers and corporate jet owners.” He asked for a “balanced” approach.

The President also seemed peeved over Repubican complaints that he hadn’t shown more leadership and, after pointing out that he had met with all constituencies, he scolded Repubicans for not working harder to solve the problem. He said he had tried “to be responsible and somewhat restrained” in explaining the consequences of not raising the Debt Ceiling, because he didn’t want to “spook” folks. He expressed several times his confidence that the Repubican leaders would “come to the conclusion that they need to make the right decisions for the country” and that they would back off their “maximalist positions” and “do the responsible thing”.

The media’s description of this timid dipping of the presidential toe into the negotiating waters was, shall we say, overwrought. “Obama Takes Congress, GOP To The Woodshed”! “Obama Intensifies Pressure On Republicans”! The response of the Repubican leaders bordered on the hysterical. They described the President’s statements as “disgraceful” and accused him of “class warfare”.

All of the negotiations have, so far, been conducted in private and the parties have been pretty tight-lipped about the framework of the impending “deal”. But once the lead Repubican negotiators walked out of the negotiations with Vice President Biden, because the Democrats were asking for some revenue increases, details began to leak out. It appears that the Democrats have agreed to around $1.3 trillion in spending cuts over the next 10 years, including between $200 billion and $300 billion in cuts to Medicare. Cuts to Pell Grants and cuts to programs to feed poor women, infants and children appear to be part of the $1.3 trillion. Funds designated for infrastructure repair are also rumored to be on the chopping block, as are funds for monitoring air quality and food quality. Rumor also has it that funds to regulate and monitor Wall Street will be eliminated. On the revenue side, the Democrats are apparently arguing for only $130 billion over the next ten years – from plugging the loopholes the President mentioned – but it doesn’t sound as though the Repubicans have agreed to anything.

This “deal” is, in a word, pathetic.

In the past, I have been critical of the President’s approach to negotiations with the Repubicans and I agree with the Repubicans that the time for President Obama to lead is long overdue. In response to the Repubican faux-outrage at Obama’s statements on Wednesday, Obama should schedule an address to the nation in which he lays out the problem and tells us what he wants Congress to do to solve it. And he should ask the American public to let their representatives know whether they agree with him or with the Repubicans. (We already know that while Americans are split about 50-50 on raising the Debt Ceiling – undoubtedly because they don’t understand the issue – around 80% of Americans want increased taxes on the rich as part of any deal to lower the deficit.)

The President’s address should cover the following:

1. Why is raising the Debt Ceiling important?
ANSWER: Raising the Debt Ceiling is necessary to pay for obligations already incurred by previous commitments of Congress. As the President pointed out on Wednesday, it’s like buying a car on credit or borrowing to take a vacation. You can’t just say later that you don’t want to pay. If we don’t raise the Debt Ceiling, we will be in default on our previously incurred obligations and the consequences for the United States and the world economy would be catastrophic. Obama can’t be “restrained” in explaining the consequences or worry about “spooking folks”. He has to lay it out there and scare the crap out of people.

2. How did we reach a point where the Debt Ceiling must be raised?
ANSWER: The Bush tax cuts, two unfunded wars, an unfunded Medicare prescription drug program, and a recession brought on by policies of the previous administration and the greed of Wall Street combined to cause the National Debt to spiral out of control. When Repubicans claim we don’t have a revenue problem, they’re wrong. The Bush recession has caused tax revenues for 2009-2011 to be $1.5 trillion less than revenues from 2006-2008. The Bush tax cuts have cost the government another $4 trillion over the past 10 years. The President should use graphs to show how job losses under Bush were increasing monthly – at the rate of 750,000 a month when Bush left office – and compare this record to the diminishing job losses, turning to job gains, under Obama.

3. Obama should make the argument that Repubicans can’t be genuinely concerned about the deficits or about the increase in the Debt. If they were, they wouldn’t have insisted last December that tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires be left in place, on threat of not allowing any legislation to be passed. That bit of blackmail caused the deficit for 2011 and 2012 to be hundreds of billions of dollars greater than it otherwise would have been. And if the Repubicans really cared about the deficit, would they have approved the Bush tax cuts and voted seven times during the Bush Administration to raise the Debt Ceiling?

Will Obama be accused of being partisan? Of course. It’s time – finally – to get partisan. The Repubicans will accuse him of it anyway. Obama has to remember that the stated goal of the Repubican leaders has been to make him fail. They hate him. Sen. McConnell recently said that if the economy doesn’t improve, that will be good for Repubicans in 2012. Many of the Repubicans don’t care whether the U.S. defaults; indeed, some of them want that to happen, because they think it will force the government to make drastic cuts in spending – something they have wanted for decades – and they think they can blame the any damage to the economy on Obama. Repubicans have obstructed everything Obama and the Democrats have attempted to do to govern and to improve the economy. Rather than pay for the debts and commitments the U.S. HAS ALREADY INCURRED BECAUSE OF THEIR POLICIES, the Repubicans are – once more – engaging in obstruction and blackmail by insisting that if the Democrats don’t agree to deep cuts to programs that help the old, the young, the sick and the poor, the Repubicans will allow the U.S. government to default on its obligations.

As I pointed out months ago, it’s become a question of politics – of persuading the American people that it is the Democrats – not the Repubicans – who have their best interests at heart. The President has to take the negotiations out from behind closed doors. Using charts and graphs, he should itemize the spending cuts demanded by the Repubicans and translate those cuts into real-world consequences for those affected – how many students will not be able to go to college, how many kids will be shut out of Head Start, how many people will go hungry, how many roads, bridges and levees will remain defectively dangerous, etc. He should juxtapose a list of the revenue generating items proposed by Democrats with the Draconian cuts proposed by Repubicans and ask whether preserving tax breaks for hedge fund managers, oil and gas companies, corporate jet owners, etc. is more important than clean air and water, uncontaminated food, kids participating in Head Start, young men and women getting a college education, decent health care and social security for our elderly, etc . He has to make the case that the Repubicans stand for the rich and for the big corporate interests, not for the average working American. He has to compare the Democratic vision for the future with the Repubican vision and ask America: Which do you want?

If President Obama really believes the Repubicans will “do the responsible thing”, i.e., agree to a balanced deal in connection with raising the Debt Ceiling, then he is a fool. If he caves in on these negotiations, as he did in December and again in April, and especially if he agrees to cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, thereby depriving Democrats of their most potent argument in 2012, then he is an incompetent fool. If he folds now, what can we expect when the 2012 budget is negotiated? Or when extension of the Bush tax cuts beyond 2012 is on the table? The Repubicans will take him to the cleaners again. Obama’s presidency – not to mention the American economy – is on the line here and it’s time for him to lead and fight for America. Obama has to draw the line and if the Repubicans continue to play “chicken”, then he must ignore the Debt Ceiling and declare it unconstitutional, citing the Fourteenth Amendment for the requirement that the U.S. honor its debts. The Repubicans will scream and there will be calls for Obama’s impeachment, but eventually, the Repubicans’ masters on Wall Street and in the board rooms of corporate America will force the Repubicans “to do the responsible thing.” Obama will be seen as a strong leader and will be reelected in 2012. The Repubican Party will be in disarray. But if Obama rolls over again, history will view him harshly and America will suffer greatly. Does the thought of President Romney, Vice President Rubio, and two more Justice Alitos on the Supreme Court make your blood run cold? No? Then you haven’t been paying attention.

Make the case, Mr. President.

This Week in God

When you consider the events of the past several years, don’t you have to ask: “Does God hate America?” We know from Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell that 9/11 was God’s punishment for our coddling of gays. We know from George Bush that he ran because God wanted him to be president (and to thwart Gog and Magog.) According to Sarah Palin, her selection as McCain’s running mate was God’s idea. And now Sharron Angle says that defeating Harry Reid for the Senate seat in Nevada is God’s plan.

You can’t help thinking: “God must be pretty pissed off at us if he wanted George Bush and Dick Cheney to run the country. Or if he wanted Sarah Palin to be the most influential member of the Repubican Party. Or if he wants Sharron Angle and Rand Paul to serve as U.S. Senators.” But there’s another way of looking at these events – especially since we know God works in mysterious ways. For example, without a doofus like Bush and an evil asshole like Cheney running the country into the ground for eight years, we would never have elected Barack Obama. So maybe THAT was God’s plan. And Sarah Palin? It just may be that God has a sense of humor and enjoys a good laugh from time to time at the idea of a vindictive, thin-skinned, poorly educated woman, who doesn’t read and who quit the only meaningful job she had less than half way through her term, actually being considered as a front-runner for the Repubican nomination for president. And here is Harry Reid – declared politically dead a few months ago – back in contention for his Senate seat because God puts the most ridiculous words in his opponents’ mouths. If Sue Lowden hadn’t suggested that doctors be paid with chickens instead of money, she probably would have been the Repubican nominee instead of Sharron Angle and would be far ahead of Harry Reid. And if Sharron Angle hadn’t said unemployed people are “spoiled”, that she favors prohibition for Nevada, that she wants to do away with Social Security, Medicare, the EPA, the United Nations, the Department of Education, that . . . well, the full list is too long. But if she hadn’t said all this stupid stuff, maybe even SHE could beat Sen. Reid. But she won’t. Viewed from this perspective, isn’t it clear that God is a Democrat? Remember, He sent His only Son to earth to talk about ministering to the poor and downtrodden. I don’t think He’s too happy at Repubicans cutting off unemployment payments because they think people without jobs are spoiled hobos.

But as I pondered these things, it occurred to me that maybe we’re focusing too much on what we think God is thinking. Maybe . . . just, maybe . . . Bush and Palin and Angle are hearing what they want to hear, not what God is actually saying. I mean, isn’t it odd that God never gives constructive criticism? Wouldn’t you give a little more credence to God’s messages if, for example, Sharron Angle held a press conference tomorrow and said: “Last night, God told me I am a nitwit who has no business in public office. Consequently, I am terminating my campaign for the Senate.” That would make me rethink some of my views – certainly not to the degree I would rethink my views if all “born agains” disappeared tomorrow, leaving behind only their truck keys and wife-beater T-shirts – but that would definitely get my attention.

But I’m guessing that won’t happen. More likely, some time in the next few months, Sarah Palin will hear God tell her to run for president. If my “God likes a good joke” theory is accurate, this is a pretty sure thing. Imagine the Repubican debates – Palin, Romney, Gingrich, Huckabee, Pawlenty and Haley Barbour on stage together. There would be a split vote on whether we evolved or were created from mud 6,114 years ago. A few would commit to a belief that Obama was born in Hawaii and there would be a few “I’m not sures”. One or two might even try to take the high ground by conceding that Obama is a citizen. (They would immediately drop 10 points in Repubican polls.) There would be unanimity that Obama is a socialist, but the majority would cut him some slack on the Nazi/Muslim/Antichrist charge. (Another drop in the polls for them.) Gingrich would win the “I hate Muslims more than you” debate and Romney would win the “Most Enthusiastic” and “Best Hair” awards. Huckabee: Most God-loving (the dude’s a minister); Sarah: Hottest, least qualified and least intelligible. Pawlenty: Most boring. Barbour: Fattest, unless Huckabee gets his act together. What a show it will be. God can hardly wait.