Blog

“I have great respect for each of you individually, but collectively I’m worried you’re going to fail — fail the country,” former White House chief of staff Erskine Bowles, a co-chairman of President Obama’s fiscal commission, sternly told the congressional supercommittee last week. Elite pressure is building on the committee to reach for a “grand bargain” to cut trillions out of the budget deficits over the next 10 years. Last week 100 House members, including 40 Republicans, dispatched a letter urging “a big, grand bargain” with “all options” — code for tax hikes — “on the table.”

In fact, the best service the supercommittee could do for the country is to fail. It is charged with a task that can only weaken an already faltering economy. The committee is like a gang of delinquents armed with grenades set to go off, but struggling to build a really big bomb that could do even greater damage. We’d prefer the grenades get defused, but we truly don’t want them to put together the bomb.

Misbegotten Mission

The supercommittee, the misbegotten offspring of the summer’s debt ceiling deal, is charged with reducing the deficit by a minimum of $1.2 trillion over 10 years by cutting spending or raising taxes. It must report before Thanksgiving and any report must be voted on before Christmas, with no amendments, no filibuster, no extended debate, majority rule. If it fails, then $1.2 trillion in automatic cuts in discretionary spending, split between domestic and Pentagon budgets, kick in. It provides a choice, as Newt Gringrich put it, between shooting yourself in the head and cutting off your right leg.

(more…)

It was an accident of scheduling, but call it fate. As President Obama was meeting with 600 major donors from the gay and lesbian community in New York to raise money for his re-election campaign, three blocks away, Van Jones and the driving beat of the The Roots electrified an overflowing Town Hall meeting of citizen activists intent on reviving the movement of hope and change – the American Dream Movement – that helped put the president in the White House in the first place.

The place was rocking, and Jones was as hot as the band. “We voted for peace and prosperity,” he stated, “not war and austerity. We’ve got to challenge both parties in Washington once more.” (more…)

By Robert Borosage,
The Campaign for America’s Future

This is a classic “small d” democratic moment. The economy is in deep trouble — immediate and long term. Washington is oblivious, compromised by moneyed interests, knotted by ideological divides. It will take an angry and aroused citizens’ movement to demand the debate worthy of a great nation in deep trouble.

The dismal jobs numbers only punctuate the reality of an economy that isn’t producing sufficient jobs. The crisis is both immediate and long-term. The so-called recovery hasn’t begun to recover the jobs lost in the Great Recession. 25 million people are in need of full time work. Home values continue to fall. 25 percent of 17- to 25-year-old high school graduates not in college are out of work. Much of a generation is at risk.

The immediate is only an expression of more profound problems. The middle class was losing ground before the Great Recession. Good jobs are being shipped abroad. Wages aren’t keeping up with the costs of basics. The broad middle class that made America exceptional is disappearing. The American dream seems ever more like a nostalgic memory. (more…)

By Robert L. Borsage, Campaign for America’s Future

John McCain continues his rousing campaign tour of the swing states of NAFTA this week. He will celebrate July 3rd in Mexico City after a jaunt through Colombia to pledge support for the pending free trade accord with that center of cocaine trade. He surely will increase his margin over Obama among business elites in Mexico and Canada. Obama will travel to Zanesville, Ohio, once more exposing himself to McCain’s jibes about embracing “protectionist” policies.

(more…)