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‘Tis the season of resolutions. With the new year comes pledges to quit smoking, get out of debt and spend more time with family. Gym memberships jump. Weight Watchers’ profits fatten.

This also happens to be the season of political resolutions. It’s that every-fourth-year event featuring presidential candidates in a contest of campaign promise one-upmanship. Ron Paul pledges to legalize marijuana. Michele Bachmann swears she’ll cut gasoline prices to $2 a gallon. Newt Gingrich guarantees he’ll create millions of jobs “right now.” Mitt Romney assures every college graduate a job.

Unfortunately, this also has been, for some time, a season of damned lies. These are deliberate deceptions involving a higher level of scheming. The Contract with America and the more recent Pledge to America are examples. Republicans knew they couldn’t fulfill what they led the public to perceive as promises. But the GOP designed these “pledges” specifically so that Republicans couldn’t be labeled as failures when what they pseudo-promised never materialized.  That’s the stuff of damned lies.

Unfulfilled New Year’s resolutions are legendary.  Low calorie salad fixings fill fridges Jan. 2, and remain there, rotting, on Feb. 2.  The victim of this broken promise is also the perpetrator and therefore unlikely to protest the infraction.

These days, political resolutions strewn along the presidential campaign trail are picked up and carefully cataloged on the Internet by reporters and bloggers who hold candidates accountable for every syllable. That’s a good exercise, but the public generally recognizes political promise hyperbole and realizes that unexpected events may prevent a president from keeping his word.  Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for example, pledged not to involve the country in the European war, but then the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Mostly, the public shrugs off presidential contenders’ inflated political resolutions.

Damned lies, however, are dangerous because they subvert trust in the political system, which needs the faith of the electorate to function. Damned lies may, in fact, be an integral part of Republican strategy since the GOP hates government of the people by the people and hopes to shrink it small enough to drown in a bathtub.

In their 1994 Contract with America, Republicans vowed:

“in this era of official evasion and posturing, we offer instead a detailed agenda for national renewal, a written commitment with no fine print.”

That, and calling it a contract, led Americans to believe it was a step above a pledge. It was inviolable, sacrosanct. It was a bond with no double-crossing footnotes.

Except it wasn’t. (more…)

Roger Hickey

By Roger Hickey
Co-Director of the Campaign for America’s Future

The terrible shootings in Arizona should make us all get beyond the sound-bite wars. Will the media let us?

As soon as the story leaked that President Obama was about to appoint former aides to President Clinton, Bill Daley and Gene Sperling, to key positions (Chief of Staff and head of the National Economic Council, respectively), reporters from major media started calling me, seeking quotes to substantiate the story they were already writing: “Progressives Outraged, New Democrats Delighted.”

Now I know enough about Daley and Sperling that my initial instinct was to join other progressive colleagues in criticizing the appointments. Daley joined the Clinton Administration to help pass NAFTA, which has since devastated US manufacturing jobs and pissed off blue collar workers (and voters in the heartland in general) who should be solidly voting Democratic, but aren’t. And I remembered that, just as we began the successful fight against the Bush plan to privatize Social Security, Sperling was actively promoting his plan for private investment accounts which could have led to a Democratic version of privatization. Luckily, the movement ignored him back then, and virtually all Democratic lawmakers joined to stop the dangerous Bush plan for Social Security in its tracks. And, of course, recent news reports made it hard to ignore the strong connections both have with big Wall Street firms that helped engineer the deregulation of banking and the speculative orgy that followed, leading to the massive collapse of the economy. (more…)

Robert Reich

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

Bill Clinton seems the perfect validator for Barack Obama — which is why the president is utilizing the former president for selling his tax deal. After all, the economy boomed when Clinton was president and 22 million net new jobs were created. From a more narrow political perspective — and this is important to Democrats in Washington — Bill Clinton was reelected, even though he lost both houses of Congress in the 1994 midterms.

But the analogy falls apart as soon as you realize Clinton’s economy was vastly different from Obama’s. The recession Clinton inherited was relatively small, and caused by the Fed raising interest rates too high to ward off inflation. So it could be reversed by the Fed lowering interest rates — as the Fed did in 1994. By 1995, the so-called “jobless recovery” had morphed into a full-blown jobs recovery. By 1996, at pollster Dick Morris’s urging, Clinton could proclaim to the American people “you’ve never had it so good, and you ain’t seen nothing yet.”

The Great Recession has been far larger, caused not by the Fed raising interest rates but by the bursting of a giant housing bubble. In 2008, the biggest asset of most middle-class people, upon which they borrowed and that they assumed would be their nest eggs for retirement, collapsed. Housing prices continue to fall in most parts of the country. The Fed has lowered interest rates all it can, and unemployment remains sky high.

Bill Clinton presided over an economic boom engineered by Fed chair Alan Greenspan, who felt confident he could drop interest rates far lower than anyone expected without risking inflation. The result was 4 percent unemployment in many parts of America, as well as the best jobs recovery in history.

The price Greenspan exacted from Clinton — and a resurgent Republican congress demanded — was a balanced budget. As a result, Clinton had to give up much of his “investment agenda” in education, infrastructure, and other long-neglected means of building the productivity of average working Americans. The economy enjoyed a huge cyclical recovery. (more…)

Leo W. Gerard

By Leo W. Gerard
USW International President

The deficit commission report issued last week is another Saturday night special pressed to the temple of the American middle class.

“Turn over your money and your benefits or your country will die,” the report screams at workers. “You want your country to go bankrupt? No? Then you gotta delay retirement, get less from Social Security, pay more for health insurance and lose your precious few income tax breaks like the one that helps pay your mortgage while the banker is breathing down your neck right now.”

For 30 years, rich conservatives have successfully threatened the American middle class this way, ever since that rich conservative Ronald Reagan converted the White House into a castle.

The result is a country with greater income inequality than during the age of corporate robber barons at the turn of the 20^th century. It is a country whose 21^st century robber barons, the richest 1 percent of Americans, take nearly a quarter of all income and demand that politicians relieve them of their obligations. The rich — hedge fund owners who rake in billions, Wall Street banksters handed bonuses in the millions, CEOs paid eight-figure golden parachutes after they mess up — insist that politicians place government debt burdens on the middle class, the unemployed, the elderly, the struggling young, people whose income has stagnated for three decades.

The co-chairmen of the deficit commission complied with that mandate from the flush when they recommended the middle class bear the brunt of the cost of reducing the deficit. Simultaneously, conservatives in Congress are acquiescing by insisting on extending tax breaks for the nation’s wealthiest. Those are the very tax breaks that contributed dramatically to creating the debt – the one that the deficit commission now wants heaped on workers’ backs.

This will be the death of the nation’s strength — its successful working class. Without the slightest regret or hesitation, the rich are killing the great American middle, rendering it a casualty of their shirked social responsibilities. Their campaign has been abetted by Republicans since Ronald Reagan. The Gipper contended slashing taxes for the wealthy would increase revenues for the government. Republican George H. W. Bush rightly ridiculed Reaganomics as voodoo.

In the GOP years between the beginning of Reagan in 1981 and the end of Bush II in 2009, the federal deficit exploded as Republican presidents failed to control spending and repeatedly cut taxes for the rich.

Reagan reduced the rate on the richest first down to 50 percent, then to 28 percent. The resulting budget deficit converted the U.S. from the world’s largest international creditor to its largest debtor. And now, the deficit commission sends the bulk of the bill for voodoo economics to the middle class, not the rich.

While Reagan gave the rich those breaks, income inequality increased. The share of total income taken by the richest 5 percent grew from 16.5 percent the year before he took office to 18.3 percent the year before he left. In that same time, the share of total income that went to the poorest 20 percent of households fell from 4.2  to 3.8 percent.

Democrat Bill Clinton fulfilled a campaign promise by increasing taxes on the rich — to a 39.6 percent marginal rate. He balanced the federal budget and left Bush II with a surplus.

Then Bush II squandered it. He gave the rich more tax breaks, accumulated debts larger than all those created by previous presidents combined and worsened income inequality. During his administration, from 2002 to 2007, the pretax income of the richest 1 percent increased 10 percent every year.  Over that same period, the median income for working Americans declined and the poverty rate rose.

From Reagan through Bush II, more than four-fifths of the total increase in U.S. income went to the richest 1 percent. Hedge fund owners, whose income is literally in the billions, pay income taxes at 15 percent – lower than the rate paid by their secretaries, who earn far less in a year than any of the top 10 hedgers do in half an hour.

Wall Street recklessness crashed the U.S. economy, throwing millions of middle income earners out of their jobs and their homes. The banksters went to Washington and got politicians to hand them bailout billions, and now those Wall Streeters plan to increase their bonuses — while unemployment remains stuck at 9.6 percent in the Main Street economy.

It is those guys, bankers grabbing year end bonuses totaling two and three times what middle class earners get for a year’s labor; it is the five-home wealthy demanding that the foreclosed-on middle class suffer for the deficit. The rich, who have received the greatest benefits from this society, have no intention of paying their share of this national responsibility.

The deficit, the Social Security shortfall, difficulties with Medicare – they could all be solved if the nation returned to taxing policies that existed under Republican President Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, when the rate on top earners was 91 percent. That was not even the high point. In the mid-1940s it was 94 percent. Generally it fluctuated between 81 percent in 1940 and 70 percent when Reagan began slashing it in 1981.

Those rates may sound confiscatory now, but it’s not like the rich actually paid them after they subtracted out all of their exemptions, deductions, loopholes, special deals, tricks and wiles.

The dozen years in the 1950s and 1960s when the rate on the richest officially was 91 percent is a time considered by many Americans to be among the nation’s greatest for the middle class, a period when American workers could afford to buy homes, send their kids to college and travel across American on vacation.

There’s no talk of that now. Raising taxes on the rich now is considered ludicrous. Ridiculous. The whole Social Security shortfall could be solved if the rich paid taxes on their entire incomes, not just the first $110,000, a break that means the wealthy pay a smaller percentage if their income toward Social Security than the impoverished. But the deficit commission didn’t propose that.

No, the rich have succeeded in eliminating as a possibility their paying an increased tax share. Now, the only consideration is cutting their taxes. They didn’t hold an actual Saturday night special to anyone’s head. The rich are snake oil salesmen slick, Bernie Madoff-style schemers. They sold voodoo economics to America, and now they’re intent on making the middle class pay for what that policy has wrought in deficits.

Reagan’s re-election ad was wrong. He didn’t institute “Morning in America.” It was mourning for the once great American middle class.

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Leo W. Gerard also is a member of the AFL-CIO Executive Committee and chairs the labor federation’s Public Policy Committee. President Barack Obama recently appointed him to the President’s Advisory Committee on Trade Policy and Negotiations. He serves as co-chairman of the BlueGreen Alliance and on the boards of the Apollo Alliance, Campaign for America’s Future and the Economic Policy Institute.  He is a member of the IMF and ICEM global labor federations and was instrumental in creating Workers Uniting, the first global union.

Mike Lux

By Mike Lux
Author, “The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be”

I wrote my initial post in such a hot rage over the proposal to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits that I didn’t take the time to edit my blog post (sorry about those strange sentence structures), or take the time to look at the details of the proposal. So now that I have calmly taken some time to do that, I have to admit that I was wrong: this thing is even worse than I originally thought, and I way understated the problems with it. The co-chairs and staff found every conceivable way to screw the middle class in ways big (very big) and small, but barely nicked the bankers who caused the meltdown of the economy, or the wealthy whose massive tax cuts ended the big budget surpluses as far as the eye could see coming out of the Clinton years. Look at some of the different ways middle class and poor people will be gauged by this proposal (and I am probably missing some):

Raises the retirement age for Social Security and Medicare to 69.

Cuts Social Security benefits.

Ends the mortgage tax deduction.

Ends the tax deduction for workers’ health benefits.

Freezes salaries for federal workers for 3 years.

Establishes co-pays for veterans at VA health services.

Raises fees to visit the national parks and the Smithsonian.

Merges the Small Business Administration into an agency (Commerce) that has always prioritized helping bigger businesses, and cuts their budget.

Eliminates the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools. (more…)

Robert Borosage

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

It’s an unending sequel. The election ends; Democrats crash; the circular firing squad opens up. Already conservative Democrats are urging the president to fire his advisors, trim his sails, “move to the center,” and spend less attention catering to his base and more trying to appeal to independent voters.

This is a staple of conservative Democratic rump groups from the Coalition for a Democratic Majority (that transmuted into Reagan neocons), the Democratic Leadership Council (that flirted with a third party after the 1994 debacle), and now the Third Way, esteemed advisors to the Blue Dogs that just lost half of their members in the election debacle.

The argument is old-doughnut stale. Progressives say Democrats were hurt because the base was discouraged and disengaged. Turnout among young voters was down dramatically (from 18 in 2008 to 11 in 2010), and they gave Democrats a lower percentage of their votes (56% down from 63%). [All data from a Campaign for America's Future-Democracy Corps poll by Greenberg Associates found here.]

Turnout among African Americans was down (from 13% in 2008 to 10%) and they too offered up a somewhat lower percentage of their vote. The rising American electorate (single women, minorities, and the young) that constituted 46% of the electorate in 2008 declined to about 40% in 2010, and again gave Democrats a lower percentage (60% compared to 67% in 2008.) The electorate that showed up in 2010 probably would have elected John McCain. Had the base been engaged, Democratic losses would have been far smaller. As it was, Latinos, roused by the right, helped staunch the tea party wave in the West. (more…)

Robert Borosage

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

In the wake of what he described as a shellacking, President Obama repeatedly detailed his willingness to sit down with Republicans, share ideas, find areas of agreement, compromise.

But the press didn’t mention the elephant in the room — so to speak. There is little reason to believe that Republican leaders have either the desire or the capacity to compromise — particularly on jobs.

The Republican job program — keep all taxes where they are, cut domestic sending by $100 billion next year, repeal the Recovery Act and TARP funding, and give small businesses a tax cut — will cost more jobs than it creates. Rep. John Boehner, the perpetually tanned future Speaker of the House, was truculent in his election eve remarks, arguing the voters message to the President was “change course.” And the way to do that was to make government smaller and cut spending. Rep. Eric Cantor, future majority leader, said the first thing for Republicans to do is to repeal the health care bill. Not exactly, a “let’s reason together” position.

Moreover, it isn’t at all clear Boehner has the capacity to compromise even if he wanted to. Republicans are now terrified by their tea-party base — and from Sen Jim DeMint to Sarah Palin, they’ve made it clear that they will oppose any compromise with Obama. (more…)

George Lakoff

By George Lakoff
Author, “The Political Mind,” “Moral Politics,” “Don’t Think of an Elephant!”

The Democratic response to the Republican Pledge to America has been factual about its economics. The September 26, 2010 Sunday New York Times editorial goes through the economic details, and Democrats have been citing the economic facts from the Congressional Budget Office. As Dan Pfeiffer reports on the White House blog, the Republicans are proposing:

Tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires by borrowing $700 billion we can’t afford;

Tax hikes for 110 million middle-class families and millions of small businesses;

Cutting rules and oversight for special interests like big oil, big insurance, credit card and mortgage companies and Wall Street banks;

Doing nothing to stop the outsourcing of American jobs or to end tax breaks that are given to companies that ship jobs overseas;

All while adding trillions to our nation’s deficit.

Their plan is also notable for what it doesn’t talk about: protecting Social Security and Medicare from privatization schemes; investing in high-quality education for our nation’s children; growing key industries like clean energy and manufacturing; and rebuilding our crumbling roads, rails and runways.

This is the same agenda that caused the deepest recession since the Great Depression.

The Democrats who have checked out the facts have echoed President Obama’s judgment of the Pledge: It’s “worthless.”

I agree. And if the voting public voted on the basis of the economic details, plus the Democrats’ system of values, the Republicans wouldn’t have a chance in hell in the November elections.

But the polls show otherwise. What do we conclude? The voting public does not vote on the basis of the economic details, and the voting public does not fully accept the Democrats’ system of values as they apply in this election.

I will make a bet. When the new polls come out next week, the Democrats’ response to the Republican pledge will not have turned around the Republican lead in the polls.

In short, the Democrats’ response to the Republican Pledge may well be irrelevant. Why? And why does the President have such a hard time defending his accomplishments? (more…)

Bill Scher

By Bill Scher
Executive editor of LiberalOasis.com

We know the pathetic disaster response to Hurricane Katrina by the Bush administration was rooted in anti-government, pro-privatization conservative ideology. President Bush removed FEMA from the cabinet, repeatedly appointed FEMA chiefs with no disaster management experience, and privatized key functions.

Have conservatives learned anything from that experience? Apparently not.

The conservative movement’s intellectual leaders at The Heritage Foundation are attacking the Obama administration for … no, I’m not kidding … using FEMA too much.

Heritage’s Matt Meyer yesterday urged governors to “stiffen their spines and FEMA to get its finger off the declaration trigger.” He continued:

In the continuing (over)reaction to the failures of Hurricane Katrina five years ago, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) once again “leaned forward” in anticipation of a hurricane…

…Since his inauguration, President Barack Obama has issued 195 FEMA declarations despite the fact that not a single hurricane has hit the United States in that time span and only one minor earthquake has occurred. In less than two years, FEMA under President Obama has issued more declarations than the Eisenhower (106), Kennedy (52), Johnson (93), Ford (101), Carter (176), and H.W. Bush (174) Administrations and only slightly fewer than the Nixon (212) and Reagan (225) Administrations did throughout their entire presidencies…

…As we have long argued, this country needs to get FEMA out of the routine natural disaster business and reserve its capabilities for catastrophic events.

There’s a lot of nonsense there to break down. (more…)

I get a lot of anti-Obama stuff these days. My response is as follows, to all of them:

I am a progressive, not a Democrat, but CERTAINLY not a Republican. My biggest problem with Obama is that he tries to pander to the right too much. 

At the end of the day, on his worst day, Obama is exponentially better for this country than George Bush was. I’ll go even further – since 1980, this country has been headed down the wrong path at breakneck speed. Worker productivity has consistently gone up, while wages have gone down. Reagan’s trickle down economic policy, moderated only slightly by Bill Clinton, has crippled our economy. While it has been very good for the very rich (about the top 0.1%), it has been a nightmare for the middle class, which has been decimated to the point that there aren’t many of us left.

I just wish that all of these naysayers, many of whom are suffering from the avalanche started by Reagan, could see that we are in the mess we’re in because of the Republicans, albeit with the complicity of the Democrats. While Democrats are less hostile to the middle class, they are still beholden to the multi-national corporations to the extent that they can give little more than lip service to the problem that they at least admit exists. 

Having said the above, why is anybody surprised that Obama hasn’t turned the Titanic around? If anybody, Democrats included, thought that ANYBODY could turn around the disaster that has been foisted upon America for the last 30 years in less than a year, they were kidding themselves. 

I just shudder to think how bad it would be if Obama had not been elected. Worse, I tremble at the thought that the electorate might consider the likes of Sarah Palin to replace him!  

Steve Walls
Vardaman, Miss. and Nashville, Tenn.

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