Union donations to federal candidates down 40%

AP:

Union donations to federal candidates at the beginning of this year were down about 40 percent compared with the same period in 2009, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Last month, a dozen trade unions said they would boycott next year’s Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., over frustration on the economy and to protest the event’s location in a right-to-work state.

This is what happens when you reportedly turn your back on the core of your own party. Read the rest of this post...

Reflections of a GOP operative who left the cult

Great (long) piece over at TruthOut by Mike Lofgren, a GOP congressional staffer who finally quit.

It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe.

A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress's generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.

If you think Paul Ryan and his Ayn Rand-worshipping colleagues aren't after your Social Security and Medicare, I am here to disabuse you of your naiveté.[5] They will move heaven and earth to force through tax cuts that will so starve the government of revenue that they will be "forced" to make "hard choices" - and that doesn't mean repealing those very same tax cuts, it means cutting the benefits for which you worked.

During the week that this piece was written, the debt ceiling fiasco reached its conclusion. The economy was already weak, but the GOP's disgraceful game of chicken roiled the markets even further. Foreigners could hardly believe it: Americans' own crazy political actions were destabilizing the safe-haven status of the dollar. Accordingly, during that same week, over one trillion dollars worth of assets evaporated on financial markets. Russia and China have stepped up their advocating that the dollar be replaced as the global reserve currency - a move as consequential and disastrous for US interests as any that can be imagined.

If Republicans have perfected a new form of politics that is successful electorally at the same time that it unleashes major policy disasters, it means twilight both for the democratic process and America's status as the world's leading power.

Read the rest of this post...

Cameron calls for enquiry on MI5/Gaddafi collaboration

It is not exactly news that the CIA was collaborating with Gaddafi. Anyone paying attention knew that the CIA was engaged in a torture program and aiding and abetting tyrants.

What is news is that Cameron has called for an independent inquiry. Since he is the British Prime Minister he is going to get one.

Don't write off Cameron's sincerity on this issue. Gaddafi had a hand in the attempts to assassinate the previous two Conservative PMs, supplying the explosives and material used. Some of the survivors of the attacks are still active in Tory politics.

Gaddafi began his support for terrorism after Britain and France refused his demands to deport opponents back to Libya to be murdered by his regime. Now we find that Bush and Blair were doing precisely that. In other words, they persuaded Gaddafi to 'renounce' terrorism by accepting his demands.

While the normal impulse of the political establishment is to cover up and suppress, this might be the exception. At this point there is no faction in British politics that has an interest in protecting Blair's legacy.

This could get interesting. Read the rest of this post...

The President’s critics know a lot more about politics than do his defenders

I'm always struck by the red herring, repeatedly trotted out by defenders of the President, that his critics simply don't understand politics. In fact, it's many of the usual presidential defenders who have never held a real job in politics, whereas many of Obama's critics are some of the most politically-experienced Democrats in town.

I raise this point because the old canard, that liberal critics of the President just don't understand how hard politics really is, is rearing its head again.  This time by Jonathan Chait of the New Republic, writing in the NYT:

[T]he wave of criticism from the left over the stimulus is fundamentally flawed: it ignores the real choices Obama faced (and the progressive decisions he made) and wishes away any constraints upon his power.

The most common hallmark of the left’s magical thinking is a failure to recognize that Congress is a separate, coequal branch of government consisting of members whose goals may differ from the president’s. Congressional Republicans pursued a strategy of denying Obama support for any major element of his agenda, on the correct assumption that this would make it less popular and help the party win the 2010 elections. Only for roughly four months during Obama’s term did Democrats have the 60 Senate votes they needed to overcome a filibuster. Moreover, Republican opposition has proved immune even to persistent and successful attempts by Obama to mobilize public opinion. Americans overwhelmingly favor deficit reduction that includes both spending and taxes and favor higher taxes on the rich in particular. Obama even made a series of crusading speeches on this theme. The result? Nada.

A few points.

1. Leftists?

It's not a serious critique if you're going to use right-wing slur words like "leftist" to describe presidential critics (used in the first graf of the piece).

2. Our problem is that we fail to recognize Congress as a separate and coequal branch of government?

I worked in Congress for five years as a lawyer to a senior US Senator. I think I'm familiar with Congress' existence, and how it works.  Yet, I still am highly critical of the President's refusal to stand up to Congress.  I'm critical precisely because I worked in Congress, and have worked in national politics since 1989 (I'm 47 years old), and thus I'm intimately familiar with the President's options.

3. The GOP is mean.

Uh yes they are.  And they were mean to Bill Clinton when they shut down the government in the 1990s (is anyone really willing to argue that Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey weren't as mean as John Boehner and Eric Cantor?)  Nixon was pretty mean too. As were lots and lots of Reagan's henchmen, and George Bush's.  Republicans tend to be pretty mean political players in general.  This isn't new, and it isn't news.  It also is no excuse for the President's actions (presidents can be pretty mean too, they're not exactly powerless).

4. Obama had 60 Dems in the Senate for only four months.

And George W. Bush never had more than 55 Republicans in the Senate throughout his eight year term, and I don't recall him whining about how weak he was.

5. The notion that Obama's good-hearted, full-throated efforts to defeat the GOP noise machine have proven ineffective.

Let's revisit this graf:

Republican opposition has proved immune even to persistent and successful attempts by Obama to mobilize public opinion. Americans overwhelmingly favor deficit reduction that includes both spending and taxes and favor higher taxes on the rich in particular. Obama even made a series of crusading speeches on this theme. The result? Nada.

When has the President ever been persistent in pushing a message?  He has, in fact, persistently led from behind.  On the stimulus, rather than going to Maine and calling Olympia Snowe's and Susan Collins' bluff, the President decided to have Rahm quietly negotiate with them behind the scenes, and slowly he gave away the bank.  And on health care reform, the President was missing in action for most of the year, giving only the occasional speech, but most certainly not making any real concerted effort to win over the American people.  Hell, the President sold us out on the public option and prescription prices from the beginning, we now know.

These are White House talking points at their very worst.  The notion that whatever the President does, the forces of GOP evil will inevitably win unless he caves.  And perhaps, sadly, that's true - with this president. Because whatever he does tends to be half-hearted.  He doesn't stand up to his opponents,  unless they're to the left of him.  And he doesn't either understand, or believe in, full-throttled PR campaigns.  So to suggest that he gave it the good old college try, and failed, is just flat out wrong.

Where's the ongoing PR campaign defending the successful (but too small) stimulus?  Where's the ongoing PR campaign defending health care reform?  I've not seen it.  And can't name anyone who has.

Next, Chait notes that in late 2008, early 2009, liberals were asking for a smaller stimulus than what was actually passed, so, he seems to imply, Obama actually got more than anybody wanted!  In fact, in the first months following the Lehman collapse, economists and others didn't fully grasp how bad things were going to get - so, yes, by November of 2008 people like Krugman were asking for a much smaller stimulus than they were recommending just a month or two later.  Why?  Because as each new week dawned, the economy got far worse than anyone had ever predicted.  By the time Congress got working on the stimulus plan, the experts said it needed to be far bigger than what the President was asking for.

So while people did talk about a $200 to $300bn stimulus in the waning months of 2008, the amount the experts thought was needed kept growing by the day, until Krugman and Stiglitz finally said we needed a good $600bn to $800bn a year, for several years.  And that's not what we got.  By early January of 2009, long before the stimulus was passed, both Krugman and Stiglitz had weighed in to say that the amount the President was asking for was far too small.  And I quote Krugman at length, from January 9, 2009:

Mr. Obama’s prescription doesn’t live up to his diagnosis. The economic plan he’s offering isn’t as strong as his language about the economic threat. In fact, it falls well short of what’s needed....

To close a gap of more than $2 trillion — possibly a lot more, if the budget office projections turn out to be too optimistic — Mr. Obama offers a $775 billion plan. And that’s not enough....

But only about 60 percent of the Obama plan consists of public spending. The rest consists of tax cuts — and many economists are skeptical about how much these tax cuts, especially the tax breaks for business, will actually do to boost spending. (A number of Senate Democrats apparently share these doubts.) Howard Gleckman of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center summed it up in the title of a recent blog posting: “lots of buck, not much bang.”

The bottom line is that the Obama plan is unlikely to close more than half of the looming output gap, and could easily end up doing less than a third of the job....

Whatever the explanation, the Obama plan just doesn’t look adequate to the economy’s need. To be sure, a third of a loaf is better than none. But right now we seem to be facing two major economic gaps: the gap between the economy’s potential and its likely performance, and the gap between Mr. Obama’s stern economic rhetoric and his somewhat disappointing economic plan.

A third of a loaf. And he was right. But this White House doesn't particularly like liberals - of leftists, should I say - and thus Krguman and Stiglitz were ignored, which is a big part of the reason we're in the economic mess we are today.

So let's not rewrite history and pretend that the stimulus the President passed was somehow bigger than anyone wanted at the time. It was already too small, a lot of us knew it, and in spite of the fact that America was thought to be on the verge of another Great Depression, the President blinked and asked for less than what many knew was needed. That's hardly a profile in courage, especially when you're at 67% in the polls, have just won a massive mandate, and your opposition is in ruins.

And let's not forget that while the nation teetered on the verge of another Great Depression, the White House didn't define "victory" as getting the amount of money needed to stop that depression, but rather, they defined victory as crafting a bill that would get 80 votes in the Senate, rather than the 50 (or 60) needed to simply pass the bill. In other words, they were willing to sell away substance in order to get a super-majority of votes. I'd have rather had 51 votes (or 60) and gotten the amount of money we actually needed.

Again, Krugman saw it all coming on January 6, 2009:

I see the following scenario: a weak stimulus plan, perhaps even weaker than what we’re talking about now, is crafted to win those extra GOP votes. The plan limits the rise in unemployment, but things are still pretty bad, with the rate peaking at something like 9 percent and coming down only slowly. And then Mitch McConnell says “See, government spending doesn’t work.”

Yes, rather than everyone expressing their surprise at what a wonderfully large stimulus package the President was asking for, in fact, the experts were pretty damn upset about what the President was doing, and they predicted, to a T, how the stimulus would be perceived as an abysmal failure.

President Obama was uniquely situated, shortly after the election, to get whatever he wanted from Congress, had he simply tried.  He didn't.  Whether it's because he's politically naive, conflict averse, or some manchurian Republican, the President simply did not do what was required to pass the legislation that was necessary.  As Joe and I have described on the blog repeatedly, the President had options.  He could have barnstormed Maine and forced Snowe and Collins to support a larger stimulus, but he didn't.  He could have taken the battle to the Republicans, nationwide.  But he didn't.

The failure of the stimulus was a failure of the President's leadership.  For whatever underlying reason, Barack Obama is conflict-averse.   And no rewriting of history will change that fact - it simply guarantees more of the same in the future. Read the rest of this post...

White House calls environmentalists "ridiculous," "silly," and not "serious" - equates them to GOPers

Welcome to the underside of the bus. From the NYT:

Finding a middle ground is difficult, especially in the midst of heated political wrangling over how to cope with the sputtering economy. Businesses are focusing almost entirely on the costs. Environmental groups, meanwhile, tally up the benefits without paying much heed to the costs.

“My view is that the Republican claim that ‘job-killing regulation’ is a redundancy is as ridiculous as the left-wing view that ‘job-killing regulation’ is an oxymoron,” said Cass Sunstein, head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. “Both are silly political claims that have no place in a serious discussion.”

Then I hope the White House has a plan to replace those environmental voters next November (and I'm sure they do, this is all part of the "win the middle" strategy that has so far lost the White House the middle in poll after poll), because enviro votes are clearly not desired by a White House that finds environmentalists "left-wing," "ridiculous," "silly," and not "serious."

You can keep hoping and praying that the President will take you seriously, or you can get in his face like gay activists did when we found that our groups' strategy of playing nice was getting us nowhere.  This White House does not respect the Democratic base or core Democratic issues.  They only respect people who challenge them -- people who "take hostages," to quote the President.

Food for thought. Does anyone honestly think the President is going to be more helpful on any of our issues once he has the re-election under his belt and truly doesn't have to worry about how we'll vote ever again?

More food for thought, for those who might suggest we just let this slide.  If we let the White House keep criticizing Democrats in Congress and Democratic interest groups with impunity, if we let their ongoing criticism depress the Democratic vote and hurt the image of Democrats who are up for re-election (thus hurting their chances for re-election), our silence could ensure that Democrats lose next November.

It's not disloyal speaking up.  It's disloyal watching an electoral train wreck coming your way, and doing nothing about it. Read the rest of this post...

UK intelligence also worked with Gaddafi

This list is surely longer than many might imagine. It will be interesting to see what information emerges when Assad falls. The Guardian:

Evidence that British intelligence agencies mounted their own "rendition" operation in collaboration with Muammar Gaddafi's security services has emerged with the discovery of a cache of Libyan government papers in an abandoned office building in Tripoli.

A secret CIA document found among the haul shows that the British and Libyans worked together to arrange for a terrorism suspect to be removed from Hong Kong to Tripoli – along with his wife and children – despite the risk that they would be tortured. The wording of the document suggests the CIA was not involved in the planning of the rendition operation, but was eager to become engaged during its execution and offered financial support.

Other papers found in the building suggest MI6 enjoyed a far closer working relationship with Gaddafi's intelligence agencies than has been publicly known, and was involved in a number of US-led operations that also resulted in Islamists being consigned to Gaddafi's prisons.

Read the rest of this post...

Tony Blair "one of Murdoch's closest friends"

Surprising in a not-so-surprising way.

It was a relationship that began in political controversy but progressed to a secret family union: Tony Blair, it was revealed , is godfather to Rupert Murdoch's nine-year-old daughter, Grace, the second youngest of his six children.

In a culmination of 15 years of political intimacy, the former Labour prime minister was present at the star-studded baptism of the child on the banks of the Jordan, at the spot where Jesus is said to have undergone the same ceremony, according to an article in Vogue magazine.

With the Murdochs and their children dressed in white – and present at the invitation of Queen Rania of Jordan – the event was photographed in Hello! magazine, complete with an ethereal front cover image of a smiling Murdoch in an open-necked shirt.

Read the rest of this post...

Woody Guthrie’s Union Maid

This is a wonderful union song, and one of the first songs I ever learned to play in the Chicago days. Woody Guthrie's classic "Union Maid" as sung by his son Arlo and Pete Seeger. Enjoy:



Wonderful, telling lyrics:

There once was a union maid
Who never was afraid
Of the goons and the ginks
And the company finks
And the deputy sheriffs that made the raids.

She went to the union hall
When a meeting it was called
And when the company boys came around
She always stood her ground.

Oh you can't scare me, I'm sticking to the union.

Here's another Seeger version from the civil rights era, featuring a full set of lyrics.



It's wonderful to look back on an era when people really did have hope, and really did expect change.

Another great version here, Billy Bragg & Co from a 2009 Madison Square Garden concert. Music for a union summer's eve.

GP Read the rest of this post...