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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: coug who wrote (85892)	10/3/2011 10:18:05 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 89467

Can the left stage a Tea Party? washingtonpost.com By E.J. Dionne Jr. Columnist The Washington Post Why hasn’t there been a Tea Party on the left? And can President Obama and the American left develop a functional relationship? That those two questions are not asked very often is a sign of how much of the nation’s political energy has been monopolized by the right from the beginning of Obama’s term. This has skewed media coverage of almost every issue, created the impression that the president is far more liberal than he is, and turned the nation’s agenda away from progressive reform. A quiet left has also been very bad for political moderates. The entire political agenda has shifted far to the right because the Tea Party and extremely conservative ideas have earned so much attention. The political center doesn’t stand a chance unless there is a fair fight between the right and the left. It’s not surprising that Obama’s election unleashed a conservative backlash. Ironically, disillusionment with George W. Bush’s presidency had pushed Republican politics right, not left. Given the public’s negative verdict on Bush, conservatives shrewdly argued that his failures were caused by his lack of fealty to conservative doctrine. He was cast as a big spender (even if a large chunk of the largess went to Iraq). He was called too liberal on immigration and a big-government guy for bailing out the banks, using federal power to reform the schools and championing a Medicare prescription drug benefit. Conservative funders realized that pumping up the Tea Party movement was the most efficient way to build opposition to Obama’s initiatives. And the media became infatuated with the Tea Party in the summer of 2009, covering its disruptions of congressional town halls with an enthusiasm not visible this summer when many Republicans faced tough questions from their more progressive constituents. Obama’s victory, in the meantime, partly demobilized the left. With Democrats in control of the White House and both houses of Congress, stepped-up organizing didn’t seem quite so urgent. The administration was complicit in this, viewing the left’s primary role as supporting whatever the president believed needed to be done. Dissent was discouraged as counterproductive. This was not entirely foolish. Facing ferocious resistance from the right, Obama needed all the friends he could get. He feared that left-wing criticism would meld in the public mind with right-wing criticism and weaken him overall. But the absence of a strong, organized left made it easier for conservatives to label Obama as a left-winger. His health-care reform is remarkably conservative — yes, it did build on the ideas implemented in Massachusetts that Mitt Romney once bragged about. It was nothing close to the single-payer plan the left always preferred. His stimulus proposal was too small, not too large. His new Wall Street regulations were a long way from a complete overhaul of American capitalism. Yet Republicans swept the 2010 elections because they painted Obama and the Democrats as being far to the left of their actual achievements. This week, progressives will highlight a new effort to pursue the road not taken at a conference convened by the Campaign for America’s Future that opens Monday. It is a cooperative venture with a large number of other organizations, notably the American Dream Movement led by Van Jones, a former Obama administration official who wants to show the country what a truly progressive agenda around jobs, health care and equality would look like. Jones freely acknowledges that “we can learn many important lessons from the recent achievements of the libertarian, populist right” and says of the progressive left: “This is our ‘Tea Party’ moment — in a positive sense.” The anti-Wall Street demonstators seem to have that sense, too. What’s been missing in the Obama presidency is the productive interaction with outside groups that Franklin Roosevelt enjoyed with the labor movement and Lyndon B. Johnson with the civil rights movement. Both pushed FDR and LBJ in more progressive directions while also lending them support against their conservative adversaries. The question for the left now, says Robert Borosage of the Campaign for America’s Future, is whether progressives can “establish independence and momentum” while also being able “to make a strategic voting choice.” The idea is not to pretend that Obama is as progressive as his core supporters want him to be, but to rally support for him nonetheless as the man standing between the country and the right wing. A real left could usefully instruct Americans as to just how moderate the president they elected in 2008 is — and how far to the right conservatives have strayed.

To: coug who wrote (85892)	10/6/2011 10:38:05 AM
From: stockman_scott	1 Recommendation Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 89467

Reagan Insider:........ 'GOP Destroyed US Economy'... By Paul B. Farrell MarketWatch 05 October 11 marketwatch.com The 'insider' referred to in the title is the former economic wunderkind of Reaganomics - David Stockman. -- JPS/RSN *How: Gold. Tax cuts. Debts. Wars. Fat Cats. Class gap. No fiscal discipline.* ow my GOP destroyed the US economy." Yes, that is exactly what David Stockman, President Ronald Reagan's director of the Office of Management and Budget, wrote in a recent New York Times op-ed piece, "Four Deformations of the Apocalypse." Get it? Not "destroying." The GOP has already "destroyed" the US economy, setting up an "American Apocalypse." Yes, Stockman is equally damning of the Democrats' Keynesian policies. But what this indictment by a party insider - someone so close to the development of the Reaganomics ideology - says about America, helps all of us better understand how America's toxic partisan-politics "holy war" is destroying not just the economy and capitalism, but the America dream. And unless this war stops soon, both parties will succeed in their collective death wish. But why focus on Stockman's message? It's already lost in the 24/7 news cycle. Why? We need some introspection. Ask yourself: How did the great nation of America lose its moral compass and drift so far off course, to where our very survival is threatened? We've arrived at a historic turning point as a nation that no longer needs outside enemies to destroy us, we are committing suicide. Democracy. Capitalism. The American dream. All dying. Why? Because of the economic decisions of the GOP the past 40 years, says this leading Reagan Republican. Please listen with an open mind, no matter your party affiliation: This makes for a powerful history lesson, because it exposes how both parties are responsible for destroying the US economy. Listen closely: Reagan Republican: The GOP Should File for Bankruptcy Stockman rushes into the ring swinging like a boxer: "If there were such a thing as Chapter 11 for politicians, the Republican push to extend the unaffordable Bush tax cuts would amount to a bankruptcy filing. The nation's public debt ... will soon reach $18 trillion." It screams "out for austerity and sacrifice." But instead, the GOP insists "that the nation's wealthiest taxpayers be spared even a three-percentage-point rate increase." In the past 40 years Republican ideology has gone from solid principles to hype and slogans. Stockman says: "Republicans used to believe that prosperity depended upon the regular balancing of accounts - in government, in international trade, on the ledgers of central banks and in the financial affairs of private households and businesses too." No more. Today there's a "new catechism" that's "little more than money printing and deficit finance, vulgar Keynesianism robed in the ideological vestments of the prosperous classes" making a mockery of GOP ideals. Worse, it has resulted in "serial financial bubbles and Wall Street depredations that have crippled our economy." Yes, GOP ideals backfired, crippling our economy. Stockman's indictment warns that the Republican party's "new policy doctrines have caused four great deformations of the national economy, and modern Republicans have turned a blind eye to each one:" Stage 1. Nixon Irresponsible, Dumps Gold, US Starts Spending Binge Richard Nixon's gold policies get Stockman's first assault, for defaulting "on American obligations under the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement to balance our accounts with the world." So for the past 40 years, America's been living "beyond our means as a nation" on "borrowed prosperity on an epic scale ... an outcome that Milton Friedman said could never happen when, in 1971, he persuaded President Nixon to unleash on the world paper dollars no longer redeemable in gold or other fixed monetary reserves." Remember Friedman: "Just let the free market set currency exchange rates, he said, and trade deficits will self-correct." Friedman was wrong by trillions. And unfortunately "once relieved of the discipline of defending a fixed value for their currencies, politicians the world over were free to cheapen their money and disregard their neighbors." And without discipline America was also encouraging "global monetary chaos as foreign central banks run their own printing presses at ever faster speeds to sop up the tidal wave of dollars coming from the Federal Reserve." Yes, the road to the coming apocalypse began with a Republican president listening to a misguided Nobel economist's advice. Stage 2. Crushing Debts From Domestic Excesses, War Mongering Stockman says "the second unhappy change in the American economy has been the extraordinary growth of our public debt. In 1970 it was just 40% of gross domestic product, or about $425 billion. When it reaches $18 trillion, it will be 40 times greater than in 1970." Who's to blame? Not big-spending Dems, says Stockman, but "from the Republican Party's embrace, about three decades ago, of the insidious doctrine that deficits don't matter if they result from tax cuts." Back "in 1981, traditional Republicans supported tax cuts," but Stockman makes clear, they had to be "matched by spending cuts, to offset the way inflation was pushing many taxpayers into higher brackets and to spur investment. The Reagan administration's hastily prepared fiscal blueprint, however, was no match for the primordial forces - the welfare state and the warfare state - that drive the federal spending machine." OK, stop a minute. As you absorb Stockman's indictment of how his Republican party has "destroyed the US economy," you're probably asking yourself why anyone should believe a traitor to the Reagan legacy. I believe party affiliation is irrelevant here. This is a crucial subject that must be explored because it further exposes a dangerous historical trend where politics is so partisan it's having huge negative consequences. Yes, the GOP does have a welfare-warfare state: Stockman says "the neocons were pushing the military budget skyward. And the Republicans on Capitol Hill who were supposed to cut spending, exempted from the knife most of the domestic budget - entitlements, farm subsidies, education, water projects. But in the end it was a new cadre of ideological tax-cutters who killed the Republicans' fiscal religion." When Fed chief Paul Volcker "crushed inflation" in the '80s we got a "solid economic rebound." But then "the new tax-cutters not only claimed victory for their supply-side strategy but hooked Republicans for good on the delusion that the economy will outgrow the deficit if plied with enough tax cuts." By 2009, they "reduced federal revenues to 15% of gross domestic product," lowest since the 1940s. Still today they're irrationally demanding an extension of those "unaffordable Bush tax cuts [that] would amount to a bankruptcy filing." Recently Bush made matters far worse by "rarely vetoing a budget bill and engaging in two unfinanced foreign military adventures." Bush also gave in "on domestic spending cuts, signing into law $420 billion in nondefense appropriations, a 65% percent gain from the $260 billion he had inherited eight years earlier. Republicans thus joined the Democrats in a shameless embrace of a free-lunch fiscal policy." Takes two to tango. Stage 3. Wall Street's Deadly 'Vast, Unproductive Expansion' Stockman continues pounding away: "The third ominous change in the American economy has been the vast, unproductive expansion of our financial sector." He warns that "Republicans have been oblivious to the grave danger of flooding financial markets with freely printed money and, at the same time, removing traditional restrictions on leverage and speculation." Wrong, not oblivious. Self-interested Republican loyalists like Paulson, Bernanke and Geithner knew exactly what they were doing. They wanted the economy, markets and the government to be under the absolute control of Wall Street's too-greedy-to-fail banks. They conned Congress and the Fed into bailing out an estimated $23.7 trillion debt. Worse, they have since destroyed meaningful financial reforms. So Wall Street is now back to business as usual blowing another bigger bubble/bust cycle that will culminate in the coming "American Apocalypse." Stockman refers to Wall Street's surviving banks as "wards of the state." Wrong, the opposite is true. Wall Street now controls Washington, and its "unproductive" trading is "extracting billions from the economy with a lot of pointless speculation in stocks, bonds, commodities and derivatives." Wall Street banks like Goldman were virtually bankrupt, would have never survived without government-guaranteed deposits and "virtually free money from the Fed's discount window to cover their bad bets." Stage 4. New American Revolution: Class-Warfare Coming Soon Finally, thanks to Republican policies that let us "live beyond our means for decades by borrowing heavily from abroad, we have steadily sent jobs and production offshore," while at home "high-value jobs in goods production ... trade, transportation, information technology and the professions shrunk by 12% to 68 million from 77 million." As the apocalypse draws near, Stockman sees a class-rebellion, a new revolution, a war against greed and the wealthy. Soon. The trigger will be the growing gap between economic classes: No wonder "that during the last bubble (from 2002 to 2006) the top 1% of Americans - paid mainly from the Wall Street casino - received two-thirds of the gain in national income, while the bottom 90% - mainly dependent on Main Street's shrinking economy - got only 12%. This growing wealth gap is not the market's fault. It's the decaying fruit of bad economic policy." Get it? The decaying fruit of the GOP's bad economic policies is destroying our economy. Warning: This Black Swan Won't Be Pretty, Will Shock, Soon His bottom line: "The day of national reckoning has arrived. We will not have a conventional business recovery now, but rather a long hangover of debt liquidation and downsizing ... it's a pity that the modern Republican party offers the American people an irrelevant platform of recycled Keynesianism when the old approach - balanced budgets, sound money and financial discipline - is needed more than ever." Wrong: There are far bigger things to "pity." First, that most Americans, 300 million, are helpless, will do nothing, sit in the bleachers passively watching this deadly partisan game like it's just another TV reality show. Second, that, unfortunately, politicians are so deep-in-the-pockets of the Wall Street conspiracy that controls Washington they are helpless and blind. And third, there's a depressing sense that Stockman will be dismissed as a traitor, his message lost in the 24/7 news cycle ... until the final apocalyptic event, an unpredictable black swan triggers another, bigger global meltdown, followed by a long Great Depression II and a historic class war. So be prepared, it will hit soon, when you least expect.

To: coug who wrote (85892)	12/29/2011 3:33:08 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

Of Keystones & Cop-outs __________________________________________________________________________________ By Rick Chamberlin Published on Wednesday, December 28, 2011 by CommonDreams.org http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/12/28-3 The backers of the controversial Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline, intended to carry tar sands crude oil from Canada to the Texas gulf coast, have attempted to sell the U.S. public on the notion that the project is actually a keystone to conservation. They have claimed the pipeline would not only conserve U.S. jobs but create 119,000 new ones. The company eager to build it, TransCanada, has stated the pipeline would save, or conserve, U.S. motorists money by lowering gas prices. They argue it would lead to greater energy security. Proponents have even asserted that Keystone XL would help us preserve our moral integrity. Because tar sands oil does not come from dictatorships, they say, it’s “ethical oil.” Keystone XL would do none of these things. TransCanada, Enbridge, and fossil fuel magnates like Charles and David Koch see Keystone XL as a keystone to conservation, all right – of their profits. In reality, it is a keystone to devastation. Job killer In the only jobs study independent of Keystone proponents’ influence, Cornell University’s Global Labor Institute concluded that TransCanada’s job numbers are unsubstantiated and the project could actually kill more jobs than it creates. By slowing the transformation to a clean energy economy, Keystone XL would cost the U.S. thousands of well-paying jobs in the renewable energy industry – the fastest growing sector of the economy. Price increaser In its 2008 permit application, TransCanada stated that one of the reasons it wants to build Keystone is to raise gas prices in the Midwest, which the company claims are too low relative to other parts of the country. Yet TransCanada told investors that much of the oil would be shipped from Texas to Asia and Europe. Because they are located in foreign trade zones, many of the refineries on the Texas coast can sell Canadian oil to overseas markets without paying U.S. taxes. Security threat Our energy security depends on dramatically decreasing use of the fossil fuels that are wrecking our climate – especially extreme fossil fuels like tar sands that result in much higher greenhouse gas emissions than conventional oil. A letter to House and Senate leaders last year signed by 33 retired U.S. generals and admirals stated, “Climate change is threatening America’s security. The Pentagon and security leaders of both parties consider climate disruption to be a ’threat multiplier‘ – it exacerbates existing problems by decreasing stability, increasing conflict, and incubating conditions that foster terrorist recruitment.” A morality of devastation As for preserving our moral integrity, this is pipeline backers’ most laughable claim. We Wisconsinites are no more ethical than the people of Canada; last year we allowed another tar sands pipeline, the Alberta Clipper, to bisect our state and threaten our precious ground and surface waters. But we are also the keepers of Aldo Leopold’s legacy. Leopold, the father of the Land Ethic, spent the latter part of his life in Wisconsin, and once wrote, “. . . regard for community welfare is the keystone to conservation.” Leopold defined “community” broadly; he was talking about the entire biosphere. “A system of conservation based solely on economic self-interest,” he wrote, “tends to ignore and thus eventually to eliminate, many elements in the land community that lack commercial value, but that are . . . essential to its healthy functioning.” Keystone XL would not only eliminate elements essential to the planet’s healthy functioning that lack commercial value, it would irreparably harm resources and ecological processes of immeasurable commercial value. It jeopardizes the Ogallala Aquifer, drinking water source to millions and irrigation tank for the nation’s breadbasket. Most importantly, if used as intended it would be a stake through the heart of the moderate climate on which human civilization utterly depends. As NASA’s chief climate scientist, James Hansen, has said, if the Canadian tar sands deposits are developed to their full potential, it’s essentially “game over” for the climate. The choice could not be starker: Big Oil’s keystone, which supports the fossil fuel industry’s short-term profits and could actually bring about ecological collapse – or the keystone of conservation Leopold and others championed, sculpted from a regard for the welfare of the entire earthly cathedral and its inhabitants. Leopold’s keystone supports the entire structure, which holds the finite natural capital upon which all industry depends. Keystone XL threatens to bring it all crashing down on our heads. In November, President Obama wisely delayed a decision on the pipeline until 2013, saying all its impacts should be better understood before construction begins. Last week, a majority of U.S. Senators, many of whom took large sums of campaign cash from the fossil fuel industry, voted to hold a payroll tax cut extension hostage to rushed approval of the project. The White House has said the accelerated timeframe means the project will be denied. I hope so. Regardless, the fossil fuel industry will not stop trying to conserve its obscene profits at all costs, even if it means long-term, irreversible damage to the planet from which those profits are wrung. Which is why shutting down the money pipeline running from corporations to lawmakers’ pockets is critical. To achieve that, and to prevent us from reaching the climatological tipping point Hansen and many other scientists say we’re perilously close to may require more strategic, non-violent civil disobedience of the kind I and thousands of other Americans took part in at the White House last summer. We stand ready for such action again. Only now we have tens of thousands more allies in the Occupy movement standing with us. ______________________ *Rick Chamberlin is a climate activist and freelance writer who blogs about the local and personal dimension of the climate crisis at www.climatechronicle.com. In August, he was among the 1,252 people arrested at the White House as part of a mass civil disobedience action aimed at stopping the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.