Robert Reich

By Robert Reich
Former U.S. Secretary of Labor, Professor at Berkeley

The President wants businesses that hire new employees this year to get $5,000 per hire, in the form of a tax credit. That will come to about $33 billion. It’s good step. He’s also supporting a cut in the capital gains tax for small businesses. That makes sense; after all, small businesses generate most jobs.

But here’s the problem. Both of these measures, and many of the other tax cuts he’s proposing, give ammunition to supply-siders who think the way out of this awful economy is simply to cut taxes on businesses. If a new jobs tax credit is a good idea, why not a cut corporate income taxes? If it’s useful to reduce capital gains taxes for small businesses, why isn’t it useful to reduce them for all businesses?

The answer, of course, is that across-the-board supply-side tax cuts for businesses don’t increase the demand for the things businesses produce. They’re useful only to the extent businesses are confident consumers are out there, able and willing to buy. Carefully targeted — as are the cuts the President is proposing — they can give businesses an extra nudge to hire. But without adequate demand, they’re useless.

So what’s the President’s new proposal for boosting overall demand? Hmmm. Turns out, he’s not really proposing anything new on that score. (Some who watched his State of the Union the other night thought they heard him call for a second stimulus. Actually, he didn’t, and as far as I can tell he doesn’t plan to.) His political advisors are telling him to emphasize deficit reduction instead. And that’s what he did Wednesday night when he talked about a “freeze” on discretionary spending, and a “commission” to look for ways to cut the deficit.

I can understand why Obama’s political advisors are pushing him in this direction. Many Americans borrowed too much during the boom years before the Great Recession, and now they’re paying the price. So they naturally analogize their own plight to that of the federal government and the economy as a whole. The government is too deep in debt, they reason. Logically, that means the only way out of the nation’s economic doldrums is for the government to mend its ways. The government has to reduce its budget deficit just like American families have to reduce theirs.

This analogy is faulty, of course. If John Maynard Keynes taught us anything, it’s that a federal budget is not at all like a family budget. In fact, it’s precisely because families have to pull in their belts that the federal government has to let its belt out. When consumers and businesses aren’t buying much of anything, the government has to fill the gap. That’s the only way to get jobs and get the economy moving again. Once the economy is percolating, the government can pull back. By then, tax revenues will soar, and the long-term deficit will shrink. (And yes, entitlement reform is probably necessary in the long term. But here again, it’s vitally important to separate the long term from the now.)

But if the public learns the wrong set of lessons — that tax cuts for businesses are good, and deficit reduction starting now is good — there’s no hope for getting wise policies out of Congress. The debate is framed all wrong.

The President — any president — is the nation’s educator in chief. Everything he proposes contains an implicit lesson. The economic lesson President Obama ought to be teaching is that targeted tax cuts, mostly for small business, are good to the extent they give businesses a nudge toward creating more jobs. But businesses won’t begin to create lots of jobs until they have lots of customers. And that won’t happen until lots more Americans have work. The only way to get them work when businesses aren’t hiring is for government to prime the pump.

One final lesson I wish he’d teach: The best and fastest way for government to prime the pump is to help states and locales, which are now doing the opposite. They’re laying off teachers, police officers, social workers, health care workers, and many more who provide vital public services. And they’re increasing taxes and fees. They have no choice. State constitutions require them to balance their budgets. But the result is to negate much of what the federal government has tried to do with its stimulus to date.

We need a second stimulus directed at states and locales. I wish our educator-in-chief would say that loud and clear, explain why, and then do it.

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Cross-posted from Robert Reich’s Blog

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Robert Reich served as the nation’s 22nd Secretary of Labor and now is a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley. His latest book, “Supercapitalism,” is out in paperback. For copies of his articles, books, and public radio commentaries, go to www.robertreich.org.

Dave Johnson

By Dave Johnson
Fellow with Campaign for America’s Future

The blogs and airwaves are full of explanations for the MA Senate special election’s outcome, mostly involving people being upset at particulars of the health care bill. But I don’t really think that the people who voted were all that well-informed about differences between the House and Senate versions of the bill, the “public option,” or other intricacies of ongoing legislation.

Instead, I think we should take the winning candidate’s word for it. On his website he says his win was for the following reasons, and I agree:

At his September 12 announcement of candidacy for the U.S. Senate, Senator Brown articulated a core set of beliefs that guide his thinking:
• Government is too big and that the federal stimulus bill made government bigger instead of creating jobs
• Taxes are too high and are going higher if Congress continues with its out-of-control spending
• The historic amount of debt we are passing on to our children and grandchildren is immoral
• Power concentrated in the hands of one political party, as it is here in Massachusetts, leads to bad government and poor decisions
• A strong military and vigorous homeland defense will protect our interests and security around the world and at home
• All Americans deserve health care, but we shouldn’t have to create a new government insurance program to provide it
I think the voters agreed with these basic conservative talking points. But here’s the thing: most of the assumptions underlying these statements are simply wrong – factually incorrect. They have been pounded out by a corporate/conservative misinformation machine that just makes stuff out and puts it out there on TV, the radio, email forwarding and every other channel they can find. There is no one out there responding with truth and facts, and making the case for government and democracy.

When the public only hears from one side, and hears from them over and over, day after day, after a while many people are going to believe what they are hearing. When no one seems willing to make the case for the other side of the issue, it starts to look like maybe there is no case.

The Right has a message machine that has been repeating misinformation and getting away with it, because:
1) The leadership of the other side has let them get away with it.
2) There is no comparable megaphone with which to refute the misinformation.

So is there a case to be made for government and democracy? Will our elected leaders start going before the public and making that case? Will the big funders and foundations start providing the means for progressive organizations to reach the general public and counter corporate-owned media and FOX News and Rush Limbaugh and the rest of talk radio and a million email forwards, and make the case for government and democracy? If not, then we shouldn’t expect our government and democracy to continue. But if we just take the easy way out and let the tea party crowd take over things could get scary. The alternative to “big government” is government by big corporations.

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 This post originally appeared at the Campaign for America’s Future (CAF).

Johnson also is a fellow at the Commonweal Institute and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for the Renewal of the California Dream.

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Follow Dave Johnson on Twitter: www.twitter.com/dcjohnson

 By Robert L. Borosage
Co-Director Campaign for America’s Future

To be thrown out of work is a crushing blow. Homes are lost. Families split. Children are terrified. Hopes are dashed. Today, nearly one in five American workers is without a job or scraping by on whatever part-time, short-term work there is.

We need a real jobs bill now, and a strategy that commits our government to revitalizing America’s economic foundation, built around a commitment to full employment.

Tell the Senate: We need action on jobs NOW!

Last night, in his State of the Union address, President Obama pressed the Senate to act boldly on jobs. Now it’s up to us to keep the pressure on, by making sure the voices of the jobless are heard.

Campaign for America’s Future is sending out this call to every American who needs a job, and to every American who has a friend or relative suffering in this Great Recession.

Last month, the House passed a jobs bill that was a first step towards what is needed. Now the Senate is reportedly cutting that in half, and weakening it further. This makes no sense.

But last night, President Obama demanded the Senate pass the House bill now.

Tell the Senate: We need action on jobs NOW!

The only way we’ll get the Senate to pass a real jobs bill is if it hears from the 27 million who have lost their jobs and are scrambling to get by, and the rest of us who know them and stand with them.

Tell the Senate: JOBS NOW!

The only way we’ll get the Senate to pass a real jobs bill is if it hears from the 27 million who have lost their jobs and are scrambling to get by, and the rest of us who know them and stand with them.   

 Tell the Senate: We need action on jobs NOW! GO»

President Obama told the Senate:

The House has passed a jobs bill … As the first order of business this year, I urge the Senate to do the same. People are out of work. They are hurting. They need our help. And I want a jobs bill on my desk without delay.

In fact, 27 million Americans are either out of a job or stuck in jobs that don’t offer enough hours. These are the voices the Senate needs to hear from, not the bankers and the CEOs.

Tell the Senate: We need action on jobs NOW!

President Obama also rightly noted the House bill is not nearly enough to bring this nation to full employment.

… these steps still won’t make up for the seven million jobs we’ve lost over the last two years. The only way to move to full employment is to lay a new foundation for long-term economic growth, and finally address the problems that America’s families have confronted for years.

The Senate must hear our call for not just a single jobs bill that peters out after one year, but a real long-term jobs strategy.

Tell the Senate: We need action on jobs NOW!

Bold ideas to put millions of Americans back to work have already been proposed by the AFL-CIO and other economic policy experts.

Rebuild America’s schools, roads and energy systems. Close state budget gaps to prevent mass layoffs of teachers, police and firefighters. Direct public sector hiring to expand services that strengthen our communities. Using our taxpayer dollars to “Buy American” and revitalize our manufacturing industry.

We have workers that need jobs, and jobs that need to be done. The time to act is now.

Tell the Senate: We need action on jobs NOW!

If you have lost your job, or if you know someone who has, let your Senator know. This isn’t politics. People are struggling. We need to stand with them and demand action.

Speak out today, and then share this action with all your friends and neighbors, and help us insure that the Senate hears from those who can’t afford lobbyists as they struggle simply to feed their families and house their children.

Let’s break through the partisan posturing, and send Senators a message.

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Robert Borosage and Campaign for America’s Future Co-Director Roger Hickey are co-editors of the book, The Next Agenda: Blueprint for a New Progressive Movement.

Stewart Acuff

By Stewart Acuff
Chief of Staff and Assistant to the President, Utility Workers Union of America

Our economy is mired in the worst crisis we’ve had since the Great Depression. The one seemingly insurmountable barrier to reviving the economy is the lack of consumer demand caused by 30 years of stagnant and declining wages and now rising unemployment.

At the same time there is growing awareness that our continued reliance on fossil fuel energy generation is bad for our climate, bad for our economy, is ultimately unsustainable, and is harmful to our nation’s security and future. More and more Americans realize that unless we maximize the use of sustainable, domestic sources of energy, our future is threatened.

So we have arrived at the intersection of what is good for the economy is what is good for the environment. We realize now that there is not an inherent conflict between good jobs and a healthy climate and environment. In fact good jobs and a healthy environment complement one another.

It is very hard for the average worker to care about the environment if s/he is worried about how to provide dinner for the family or pay the rent on Friday.

Moving to sustainable energy generation means, among other things, wind farms in the natural wind tunnel through the heart of America, solar farms in the Southwest, installing solar panels, weatherization, retrofitting buildings, domestic manufacturing, carbon capture and sequestration for coal, and more.

Altogether we believe this work could create as many as 2 million good paying, middle class producing jobs.

It is critical that we are very intentional about how we create these jobs to ensure that they maximize the benefit to the economy and maximize the political constituencies they attract by pumping good wages into the pockets of working families to create more consumer demand and provide benefits essential to healthy families. These jobs must pay prevailing wages. Good jobs, a healthy environment, sustainable work, sustainable economy, sustainable environment. Now is the time.

Richard Trumka

By Richard Trumka
President, AFL-CIO

The news is out: The Wall Street bankers we bailed out are giving themselves 2009 cash bonuses of a half million dollars on average — not including stocks. Compare that with the $32,390 annual median wage for regular workers, and you find a formula for outrage.

The people who tanked our economy, took $700 billion in taxpayer money and refused to make job-creating loans are getting rewards that range into the millions.

Not bad for a year in which Main Street lost 4 million jobs.

No wonder people are mad.

When Wall Street needs help, elected leaders respond with bold and swift action. When Main Street cries for help, we get gridlock. No health care reform, no financial reform, no labor law reform, and a slow, timid effort on job creation.

The anger out there is well-deserved. Workers are hurting. We haven’t seen so much militant sentiment demanding job creation and basic fairness since hundreds of thousands of people came to Washington for the March for Jobs and Freedom in 1963.

The Massachusetts Senate election last week signaled a working class revolt — against business as usual and against politics as usual.

An AFL-CIO poll taken election night showed just how fed up people are — they want results, and aren’t seeing any.

Four out of five voters said their most important issue was strengthening the economy and creating more jobs. Controlling health care costs was next on their list, with 54 percent citing that as the main determinant of their vote.

And they said Democrats have not overreached on jobs, the economy and health care — they have under-reached.

Forty-seven percent said their concern about Democrats is that they haven’t succeeded in making needed change, while only 32 percent said they made too many changes too quickly. Even voters for Scott Brown were more concerned about a lack of change (50 percent) than about making too many changes too quickly (43 percent).

Contrary to what we’re hearing from the corporate media, the Massachusetts election wasn’t a referendum on health care reform (Brown actually lost among the 59 percent of voters who picked health care as one of their top two priorities). But it did send a clear message that voters rejected attacks on the middle class like the proposed excise tax on health care benefits. Voters who thought their health care would be taxed voted by 64 percent for Brown, while those who did not think so voted by 54 percent to 40 percent for Coakley.

The election was no endorsement of the Republican agenda either — in fact, 58 percent of voters disapprove of the job being done by congressional Republicans.

Here’s what one grassroots union leader learned from his experience in the Massachusetts race:

A year ago, the Democrats crowed that the Republicans were “irrelevant.” Today, the Republicans think the Democrats are mortally wounded. Both are wrong. In our non-ideological party landscape, in hard times whoever strikes the best pose of wounded underdog wins. The same anger that elected Obama was hijacked to elect Scott Brown: “We want change!”
There was no outpouring for a right-wing agenda in Massachusetts. Brown only received 50,000 votes more than McCain. But Coakley received 850,000 fewer votes than Obama. The Republican base remained energized. The Democratic base and independent supporters stayed home.

Unless elected leaders and candidates deliver on job creation and the economy — they’re going to join the growing numbers of jobless Americans.

Members of Congress from both parties need to heed the wake-up call from Massachusetts and start taxing Wall Street wealth to create millions of good jobs fast. To get elected in 2010, they’re going to have to PROVE they’ll create the jobs we need in an economy we need with the health care we need — and those who made the mess should pay the bill. Voters have heard too much talk already.

America’s union movement is leading a broad uprising of working people ready to make sure elected leaders and candidates get the message and don’t forget. Don’t just watch for us in the streets — join us.

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Richard Trumka served three terms as president of the Mine Workers (UMWA)

The total U.S. Gross Domestic Product is about $14 trillion. The bonuses given Wall Street bankers for 2009 are around $140 billion. So, 1% of our total economic output for 2009 is going to the banking crooks’ pockets – not even the banks themselves – just the bankers!

The message we’re getting from Washington simultaneously: Screw the working poor and their healthcare. Let ‘um die. We can’t afford health insurance reform!

The Grapes of Wrath — what a read! Viewing the book with current economics in mind, one finds parallels to our present society are that are stunning. We are again ignoring and lying to an entire group of people just because they are poor. Steinbeck, now there was a great American. Man that guy could write!

Union members should start asking Republican leaders and candidates this one simple question.  What is your health care plan? They should tell the candidates that they want to know because working Americans who don’t have insurance are dying as a result.

If this question is asked enough times until November, it could have an effect.  America does want health insurance reform. Plus it really makes Republicans squirm, and that is fun.

Eric Lotke

By Eric Lotke
Research Director at the Campaign for America’s Future

The White House announced its economic initiatives for middle class families, described as a preview of the State of the Union Address. They’re all good ideas and I hope every one of them passes. But something is missing.

Mostly, the new initiatives don’t create jobs. Doubling the child tax credit, limiting student loan payments to ten percent of income, expanding tax credits to match retirement savings – they’re just relief. They are designed to help underpaid or unemployed people to cope when they don’t have enough money. They don’t create jobs or generate wealth.

Many people are hoping for more. Both middle class people looking for work, and activists looking for something to fight for.

The House of Representatives started the ball rolling with a $154 billion jobs bill in December, with half the money coming from TARP. At a minimum, Obama could help push this bill through the Senate.

More robust economic packages are out there, on the shelf, ready to be used. The AFL-CIO jobs plan puts people to work rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges, and laying new track for high speed rail. It covers the basics like aid to the states so they don’t have to lay off teachers and fire fighters

The Economic Policy Institute offers a similar plan with greater detail. Rebuilding our infrastructure and offering public service jobs when the private sector fails, EPI estimates the plan will create over 4.6 million jobs in the first year, at a gross cost of roughly $400 billion. The entire cost would be recouped within ten years by a financial transactions tax, which would take effect three years after enactment.

We need our president to take the lead and show us the way. Times are tough. It’s no time to compromise and settle for less. Obama needs to recapture the fighting spirit of the 2008 campaign.

The hole we’re in was many years getting dug. Unfunded wars and supply side tax cuts created trillion dollar deficits. Conservative deregulation turned our banks into gambling houses and crashed the whole economy. Many years will be needed to dig our way out. The Recovery Act was one small step in the right direction.

Put people to work building those wind turbines, fixing our leaky old schools and laying new railroad tracks with steel made in America. Solve our deficit the American way, by investing in a dynamic, growing economy of the future. Not with small, Clintonian mini-initiatives.

The White House shared those proposals in advance as a preview. In case it matters, that’s what I saw.

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Eric Lotke is the author of  2044, a novel describing a world of consolidated multi-national corporations, mass produced culture and too much stuff.

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This piece originally appeared at the Campaign for America’s Future.

Dean Baker

By Dean Baker
Co-Director, Center for Economic and Policy Research

The Supreme Court ruled last week that corporations could spend as much money as they want in elections, thereby making most existing restrictions on corporate election spending unconstitutional. This raises the prospect of US politics becoming even more corrupt than it already is. It will now be totally legal for Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, or any other major corporation to spend endless amounts of money to elect politicians who will drain taxpayers’ pockets to enhance their profits. This is not good for democracy.

However, if the court has ruled that Congress can’t limit political spending by corporations, then it can always go the other direction and redefine corporations. The court effectively said that corporations have the same rights as individuals in the political sphere.

But corporations are creations of the government. The economic privileges granted to corporations are set by governments, not by the Constitution and certainly not by nature. Specifically, the limited liability of the shareholders in a corporation is a special privilege that governments grant to corporations.

Because of limited liability, the individuals that own a corporation can poison our water, sell dangerous products to our kids or cripple their workers and not pay for the damage they have caused because the government limits their liability to the value of the stock they own. While there may be good economic arguments for giving corporations the privilege of limited liability, there certainly is no moral or legal argument that corporations, or more properly their shareholders, must be granted this privilege.

This allows for a simple route around the Supreme Court’s ruling. Consistent with the Supreme Court’s ruling, corporations can be given the right to engage in whatever political activity they wish. However, to get the benefit of limited liability, a corporation would have to sign away its right to take part in election campaigns. It could not contribute to political campaigns, engage in any lobbying efforts on legislation or appointees or take out issue ads.

In effect, to get the privilege of limited liability, corporations would have to give up their political rights in the same way that insurance companies often require people to give up their right to sue and instead submit to binding arbitration. Everyone still has the right to sue, but not in the cases where they have explicitly surrendered this right to the insurance company. Similarly, corporations still have the full right to take part in political activity, but not if they have surrendered this right in order to gain the privilege of limited liability.

There is actually precedent for exactly this sort of restriction in the law. Tax-exempt organizations are severely restricted in their ability to support candidates, lobby legislatures, or in other ways take part in the political process. This is not viewed as a restriction on freedom of speech; it is simply a condition of getting tax-exempt status. These organizations are free to engage in as much political activity as they like, but not when they are benefiting from tax-exempt status.

There is no reason that the government can’t apply the same rules to the political conduct of corporations as it does to tax-exempt organizations. They can do whatever they like, but not when they benefit from the privilege of limited liability.

Unfortunately, Congress is not likely to rein in corporate behavior in this way. The problem is not a legal one; the problem is that US politics are already so corrupt that any measure restricting the ability of corporations to interfere in the political process is almost a joke in political circles. Members of Congress who pushed such measures would have been targeted with a flood of money coming indirectly from corporate coffers even before the Supreme Court ruling. Now that the court has outlawed most of the restrictions that did exist, this flood will be almost unstoppable.

Unless we can do something to reverse the direction of politics in the United States, the burden that the wealthy and corporate America impose on the rest of society will grow ever larger. And we should be very clear: this has absolutely zero to do with free markets and free speech. This is entirely about writing the rules so that the rich can rip off the rest of us.

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Dean Baker is author of the new book, “Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy,” PoliPoint Press, LLC. This piece was first published on Huffington Post.

Cognitive dissonance in the Republican Party is evident in the way they appear to believe that benefits or actions they would deny to other people are perfectly all right when only Republicans receive them.  An excellent example will be found HERE.  Two Republicans, Mark Sanford and Andre Bauer currently serve as Governor and Lt. Governor of South Carolina.  We are all well aware of Mark Sanford’s notorious shenanigans, but Andre Bauer has been eclipsed by the Governor, as is often the case with lieutenant governors. (Quickly:  do you know who is the lieutenant governor of your state?)
 
So Andre Bauer, who was himself a recipient of free lunches, would deny them to other people’s children.  He blamed his speech on his grandmother who he claimed taught him that selfishness was a virtue.  Isn’t that a little like, “the devil made me do it?”  And he was reportedly twice stopped for speeding, once for driving over 100 mph in a 70 mph zone.  He said he didn’t realize how fast he was going!  That is reckless and irresponsible behavior.  It is a driver’s duty to know how fast the car is going.  Mindless control of one’s car is akin to mindless control of one’s mouth and mindless performance of duties in political office. 
 
Once again we are reminded of Colin Powell’s expressed regret that we lack a sense of shame.  Regardless of which political party we belong to, we need to resolve that the candidates we nominate to run and the leaders we elect will exemplify the highest virtues in their personal and public conduct; that is what leadership should be.  How can we expect our children to grow up respecting the law when they see that disrespect for the law and for the rights of others and for personal discipline apparently leads to some measure of “success?”  And let us never forget that we are known by the company we keep.  That is why I left the Republican Party, because I didn’t wish to be identified with the likes of Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and other lawbreakers.
 
In all honesty, I supported Richard Nixon in his first run for the presidency, believing him to be an exponent of Quaker values.  But I have long admitted that was my error, and I have since learned to be more selective.  I just wish that everyone else would be as diligent in their appraisal of political candidates. 

Leo Toribio
Pittsburgh, Pa.

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Robert Reich

By Robert Reich
Former U.S. Secretary of Labor, Professor at Berkeley

President Obama today offered a set of proposals for helping America’s troubled middle class. All are sensible and worthwhile. But none will bring jobs back. And Americans could be forgiven for wondering how the President plans to enact any of these ideas anyway, when he can no longer muster 60 votes in the Senate.

The bigger news is Obama is planning a three-year budget freeze on a big chunk of discretionary spending. Wall Street is delighted. But it means Main Street is in worse trouble than ever.

A pending freeze will make it even harder to get jobs back because government is the last spender around. Consumers have pulled back, investors won’t do much until they know consumers are out there, and exports are miniscule.

In December 1994, Bill Clinton proposed a so-called “middle class bill of rights” including more tax credits for families with children, expanded retirement accounts, and tax-deductible college tuition. Clinton had lost his battle for health care reform. Even worse, by that time the Dems had lost the House and Senate. Washington was riding a huge anti-incumbent wave. Right-wing populists were the ascendancy, with Newt Gingrich and Fox News leading the charge. Bill Clinton thought it desperately important to assure Americans he was on their side.

Two months later, Clinton summoned Dick Morris to the White House to figure out how Clinton could move to the right and better position himself for reelection. The answer: Balance the budget.

But in 1994, Clinton’s inconsistencies didn’t much matter. The U.S. economy was coming out of a recession. It was of no consequence that Clinton’s jobs proposals were small or that he moved to the right and whacked the budget, because within a year the great American jobs machine was blasting away and the middle class felt a lot better. Dick Morris was not responsible for Clinton’s reelection. Nor was Clinton’s move to the right. What reelected Bill Clinton in 1996 was a vigorous jobs recovery that was on the way to happening anyway.

Today, though, there’s no sign on the horizon of a vigorous recovery. Jobs may be coming back a bit in the next months but the country has lost so many (not to mention all those who have entered the workforce over the last two years and still can’t land a job) that it will be many years before the middle class can relax. Furthermore, this recession isn’t like other recessions in recent memory. It has more to do with problems deep in the structure of the American economy than with the ups and downs of the business cycle.

Like Clinton’s, Obama’s package of middle class benefits is small potatoes. They’re worthwhile but they pale relative to the size and scale of the challenge America’s middle class is now facing. Obama can no longer afford to come up with lists of nice things to do. At the least, he’s got to do two very big and important things: (1) Enact a second stimulus. It should mainly focus on bailing out state and local governments that are now cutting services and raising taxes, and squeezing the middle class. This would be the best way to reinvigorate the economy quickly. (2) Help distressed homeowners by allowing them to include their mortgage debt in personal bankruptcy — which will give them far more bargaining leverage with morgage lenders. (Wall Street hates this.)

Yet instead of moving in this direction, Obama is moving in the opposite one. His three-year freeze on a large portion of discretionary spending will make it impossible for him to do much of anything for the middle class that’s important. Chalk up another win for Wall Street, another loss for Main.

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Cross-posted from Robert Reich’s Blog

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Robert Reich served as the nation’s 22nd Secretary of Labor and now is a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley. His latest book, “Supercapitalism,” is out in paperback. For copies of his articles, books, and public radio commentaries, go to www.robertreich.org.