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Robert Reich

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

Next Tuesday Americans will be deciding whether to hand over even more of our government to corporations that have been plundering America — such as Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Citibank, Wellpoint insurance, Massey Energy, and Halliburton, the giant oil services company.

Not every large corporation is irresponsible, of course, but plunderers that get away with it gain a competitive advantage over the more responsible, and thereby lead a race to the bottom.

Case in point: The staff of the presidential commission investigating the BP oil spill has just revealed that Halliburton executives knew the cement it was using to seal BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil well was likely to be unstable but didn’t tell BP or act on the information.

In a letter to the commission’s seven members, the staff found that the failure of the cement was a key factor in the blowout that caused millions of barrels of crude oil to escape into the Gulf of Mexico. (Not the sole factor, of course; most of the blame for the disaster, says the staff, still rests with BP and Transocean, the company BP hired to drill the well.)

Halliburton has not exactly sat out this election. Last May, as Congress began investigating its role in the disaster, its political action committee made 14 contributions — 13 to Republicans and one to a Democrat. Many were involved in the investigation; others had responsibility for overseeing oil drilling in the Gulf. It was the biggest donation month for Halliburton’s PAC since September 2008. (more…)

Bill Scher

By Bill Scher
Executive editor of LiberalOasis.com

No matter what happens on Tuesday, progressives will not have unfettered control of Washington, just as we have not the last two years, the last decade, the decade before that, or the decade before that.

We will have to fight for more change. The question is: who will we have to fight?

The last two years, while the Tea Party has been a loud sideshow, on policy matters we have mainly fought right-leaning Democrats.

We fought them over the size of the Recovery Act. We fought them over the scope of health care reform and Wall Street reform. We fought them over how to avert a climate crisis.

It’s been annoying.

But the center of gravity of all those debates been to the left of center: How much active government is needed to get the economy back on track? What kind of regulations are needed to rein in health insurers and big banks? How should a carbon cap be structured?

If Democrats lose control of Congress, the Tea Party will no longer be a sideshow. It will be playing a direct role in setting the policy.

In turn, the fights will be very different. (more…)

On Tuesday, for hope and progress, put the car in D:

David Sirota

By David Sirota
Political journalist, best-selling author and syndicated newspaper columnist

Redistributionist — as epithets go, the moniker is so mild, so … 2008. Today, we’re hammered by screeds against Democrats’ alleged socialism and President Obama’s supposed Marxism. The class war is clearly on — the paranoids and royalists of the world have united, seizing the means of propaganda production in these waning days of this year’s election campaign.

The onslaught, of course, is predictable. After all, this is an election season, which inevitably evokes redbaiting crusades by the plutocrats. Less predictable is this crusade’s traction. As Wall Street executives make bank off bailouts, as millions of Americans see paychecks slashed and as our economic Darwinism sends more wealth up the income ladder, it’s surprising that appeals to capitalist piggery carry more electoral agency than ever.

What could cause this intensifying politics of free-market fundamentalism at the very historical moment that proves the failure of such an ideology? Two new academic studies suggest all roads lead to ignorance.

The first, by Harvard’s Michael Norton and Duke’s Dan Ariely, finds that Americans grossly underestimate how much inequality our economy produces. Among the survey respondents, the vast majority said they believe the richest 20 percent own 59 percent of the wealth, when, in fact, that quintile owns 84 percent of the wealth. In other words, in spite of the data, many believe our system produces the moderate equality we desire, which means many see efforts to better spread wealth as a confiscatory overreach.

That, however, is not the full story of 2010. Because this now-ascendant economic view relies on misperceptions about inequality, we are still left to wonder: What accounts for those misperceptions? (more…)

This Nov. 2, remember the damage working people suffered at the hands of Republicans.

Vote for Democrats.

Ian Fletcher

By Ian Fletcher
Adjunct fellow, U.S. Business & Industry Council

The price of living in the fantasy world of free-trade economics continues to rise for America.

Failure to recognize the pitfalls will probably mean a continuing struggle to emerge from recession, as much U.S. domestic demand leaks abroad due to the trade deficit, rather than being recycled at home. And America will continue to lose key industries: not just the primitive ones a developed nation should shed, but the high-tech jobs of the future.

Any serious discussion of free trade must confront David Ricardo’s celebrated 1817 theory of comparative advantage, whose tale of English cloth and Portuguese wine is familiar to generations of economics students. According to a myth accepted by both laypeople and far too many professional economists, this theory proves that free trade is best, always and everywhere, regardless of whether a nation’s trading partners reciprocate.

Unfortunately for free traders, it is riddled with holes, some of which even Ricardo acknowledged. If they held true, the hypothesis would hold water. But because they often don’t, it is largely inapplicable in the real world. Here’s why:

– The first dubious assumption is that trade is sustainable. But when a nation imports so much that it runs a trade deficit, this means it is either selling assets to foreign nations or going into debt to them. These processes, while elastic, aren’t infinitely so. This is precisely the situation the U.S. is in today: Not only does it risk an eventual crash, but in the meantime, every dollar of assets it sells and every dollar of debt it assumes reduces the nation’s net worth. (more…)

Robert Reich

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

This, from the Washington Post‘s conservative pundit George Will:

Total spending by parties, campaigns and issue-advocacy groups concerning every office from county clerks to U.S. senators may reach a record $4.2 billion in this two-year cycle. That is about what Americans spend in one year on yogurt, but less than they spend on candy in two Halloween seasons. Proctor & Gamble spent $8.6 billion on advertising in its last fiscal year.
Those who are determined to reduce the quantity of political speech to what they consider the proper amount are the sort of people who know exactly how much water should come through our shower heads — no more than 2.5 gallons per minute, as stipulated by a 1992 law. Is it, however, worrisome that Americans spend on political advocacy — determining who should make and administer the laws — much less than they spend on potato chips, $7.1 billion a year?

In a word, Mr. Will, yes. (more…)

--------- Tula Connell --------- Photo by Joe Kekeris

By Tula Connell
AFL-CIO Managing Editor

Glenn Beck wants you to be afraid. Very afraid—of unemployed workers.

Rather than championing an unemployment insurance extension for these workers, rather than being outraged that Republicans in Congress have blocked, time and again, extension of unemployment insurance for what has become the largest number of workers who have been jobless for the longest period since the Depression, he raises the specter of an Unemployed Army. (H/t to Media Matters.)

And even worse—an Unemployed Army that wants to join unions.

OMG. How bad could it get? (more…)

Dave Johnson

By Dave Johnson
Fellow with Campaign for America’s Future

Did you know that almost every conservative politician in the country has signed a pledge to encourage big multinational corporations to keep sending jobs out of the country?

Grover Norquist, head of the lobbying organization Americans for Tax Reform, is one of the leaders of the modern “conservative movement.” Norquist is well-known (among certain circles) for his statement that he wants to shrink government “down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”

As part of the conservative movement’s long-term strategy to weaken and destabilize government, his organization gets conservative politicians to sign a Taxpayer Protection Pledge: “In the Taxpayer Protection Pledge, candidates and incumbents solemnly bind themselves to oppose any and all tax increases.” Almost every conservative politician in the country has signed this pledge.

Of course, the point of this is to destroy government’s ability to govern. And, of course, with government, i.e. “We, the People,” out of the way, something else necessarily fills the vacuum. And that something else is the large monopolistic corporations and extremely wealthy few that fund organizations like Americans for Tax Reform and the rest of the “conservative movement.” (Quelle surprise.) This is why conservatives propose tax cuts as the solution to everything — it is really about defunding government by causing the government to run out of money. This is why you will never, ever hear a conservative talk about any actual “spending cuts” they propose, with specifics, and how their proposed cuts will add up to actually cutting the deficit. It isn’t about cutting the deficit, it is about getting rid of government’s ability to regulate what these corporations do. (more…)

Daily Show host Jon Stewart interviewed President Barack Obama Wednesday night, eliciting laughs between tough questions. The President talks about audacity versus reality, the economy, transforming Washington D.C. and “change you can believe in” taking time to accomplish reasonably.