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What kind of society, exactly, do modern Republicans want? I’ve been listening to Republican candidates in an effort to discern an overall philosophy, a broadly-shared vision, an ideal picture of America.

They say they want a smaller government but that can’t be it. Most seek a larger national defense and more muscular homeland security. Almost all want to widen the government’s powers of search and surveillance inside the United States — eradicating possible terrorists, expunging undocumented immigrants, “securing” the nation’s borders. They want stiffer criminal sentences, including broader application of the death penalty. Many also want government to intrude on the most intimate aspects of private life.

They call themselves conservatives but that’s not it, either. They don’t want to conserve what we now have. They’d rather take the country backwards — before the 1960s and 1970s, and the Environmental Protection Act, Medicare, and Medicaid; before the New Deal, and its provision for Social Security, unemployment insurance, the forty-hour workweek, laws against child labor, and official recognition of trade unions; even before the Progressive Era, and the first national income tax, antitrust laws, and Federal Reserve.

They’re not conservatives. They’re regressives. And the America they seek is the one we had in the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century. (more…)

Senator Bernie Sanders reacts to the failure of the Senate Super Committee to reach a compromise on the federal budget.

Robert Reich explains how the Super Committee could reduce the deficit by raising taxes on the 1% and create jobs, rather than making cuts that will hurt working families.

Texas Governor Rick Perry touts himself as the most conservative candidate who is electable. He prays with the fundamentalists, hunts with the Second Amendment gang, decries federal tyranny with the 10th Amendment crowd, and “pokes” around with the birthers. He just released an economic plan that looks like a conservative wish list. And in doing so, he reveals the essential bankruptcy of today’s conservative politics.

Perry’s plan is anchored in the belief that the rich have too little money. He would eliminate taxes on million dollar estates, coddling the heirs to the wealthy. He would tax work but eliminate all taxes on wealth – on capital gains, interest and dividends. Warren Buffett’s tax rate will plummet towards zero. He’d install an optional flat tax at 20%, offering the affluent their choice of the old code or the flat tax, insuring full employment for accountants.

In the US, the richest 1% now make about as much as the bottom 60% combined, and have as much wealth as the bottom 90%. Perry would insure that the rich do even better. Asked about this, Perry said “I don’t care” if my proposals add to inequality. He assumes that if the rich have more money, they will use it to create jobs. But there is no evidence to support that fact. Over the last decade, with the top end Bush tax cuts and the wealthiest 1% capturing all the rewards for growth, we suffered the worst job creation record since the Depression, and wages for the typical US household lost ground for the first time when the economy was growing. (more…)

Congressional Republicans are still trying to persuade Americans that they are focused on job creation, but each time they propose another piece of legislation, it is exposed as a gimmick that will do little, if anything, to create jobs. Such was the case with their anti-regulatory policies, their attempts to repeal health care reform, and virtually every other policy proposal they have brought forth.

Next up in that line, unfortunately, is a rehashed form of a radical Balanced Budget Amendment, a plan that according to recent analyses would actually cost America 15 million jobs. But thanks to the conservative wing of the Democratic Party, the Republicans won’t be alone in their chase for a radical budget amendment that could help push the country back into the throes of recession.

Despite the fact that House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-MD) said yesterday he would encourage his party to vote against the radical plan, Blue Dog Democrats endorsed the amendment on a press call today, Politico’s Marin Cogan reported on Twitter. ThinkProgress confirmed that endorsement with a spokesperson for Rep. Mike Ross (D-AR), the Blue Dog Coalition’s co-chair for communications. According to the Hill, Ross said on the call that Blue Dogs favored such an amendment “before balanced budget amendments were cool”:

“We were advancing a balanced budget amendment when balanced budget amendments weren’t cool,” a co-chairman of the coalition, Rep. Mike Ross (D-Ark.), told reporters on a conference call. [...]

“If any Blue Dog does not vote for it, I’d have to question how much they’re a Blue Dog,” [Blue Dog Rep. Jim] Matheson [D-UT] said.

It’s hard to overestimate the negative effects such an amendment would have on the country’s economy. In addition to destroying millions of jobs, it would force such massive spending cuts that House Republicans’ own budget would be unconstitutional. According to a recent study by Macroeconomic Advisers, enacting a BBA now would double the nation’s unemployment rate and cause the economy to shrink by 17 percent — a far cry from the 2 percent projected growth that would occur with no such amendment.

Unfortunately, according to another analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the consequences get worse. The draconian budget cuts caused by a Balanced Budget Amendment would forice lawmakers to gut Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), among other programs, the analysis found:

“The constitutional balanced budget amendment that the House is expected to consider this week could force Congress to cut all programs by an average of 17.3 percent by 2018.

“If revenues are not raised (the House-passed budget resolution assumes no increase above current-policy levels) and all programs are cut by the same percentage, Social Security would be cut $184 billion in 2018 alone and almost $1.2 trillion through 2021; Medicare would be cut $117 billion in 2018 and about $750 billion through 2021; and Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) would be cut $80 billion in 2018 and about $500 billion through 2021.”

In order to preserve those programs, Congress would have to cut ridiculously deep into every other program. Yesterday, economists around the country warned Congress that enacting widespread budget cuts and other austerity measures now would have perilous consequences for the American economy, pushing the country to the brink of a second deep recession. Today, unfortunately, Blue Dog Democrats decided not only to ignore those warnings, but to endorse an even bigger, deeper austerity plan.

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This material [article] was created by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. This entry originally appeared at thinkprogress.org.

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Travis Waldron is a reporter/blogger for ThinkProgress.org at the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Travis grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, and holds a BA in journalism and political science from the University of Kentucky. Before joining ThinkProgress, he worked as a press aide at the Health Information Center and as a staffer on Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway’s 2010 Senate campaign.

It may be that all the millions of dollars spent by both sides and the tens of thousands of precinct walks they (well, chiefly labor) undertook in the battle to repeal Ohio’s Senate Bill 5, which nullified the collective-bargaining rights of the state’s public employees, merely ensured that Ohioans would vote the way they originally intended to. The latest poll taken before today’s election—from Public Policy Polling (PPP), completed this past weekend—showed that voters backed repeal by a whopping 23-point margin, 59 percent to 36 percent. As PPP noted, voters also backed repeal by a 23-point margin when they were first polled back in March.

Initially, as Republican Governor John Kasich’s war on unions was moving through the state’s legislature, liberals feared that popular opposition was tepid. In Wisconsin, the crowds of protestors swelled to 100,000 in opposing that state’s legislation curtailing public employee’s collective-bargaining rights. The one demonstration in Columbus, by contrast, drew a scant 10,000. Had Ohio gone missing?

Apparently not, though we won’t know for certain until the votes come in tonight. Columbus may not have been Madison, a college town with a tradition of protest, but Ohio had other progressive traditions, as became evident when 1.3 million state residents signed petitions to put Issue 2—the referendum on Senate Bill 5—on November’s ballot. Indeed, Wisconsin liberals, lacking the option of a referendum, had to rely on the clumsier tactic of recalling the Republican state senators who’d passed that state’s anti-union bill. While they did manage to prevail in a couple of recall contests, they fell short of their goal of flipping the Senate into Democratic hands. If the polls are right, today’s vote in Ohio should have a more decisively pro-union outcome.

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Despite what the Supreme Court and Mitt Romney say, corporations aren’t people. (I’ll believe they are when Georgia and Texas start executing them.)

The Court thinks corporations have First Amendment rights to spend as much as they want on politics, and Romney (and most of his fellow Regressives) think they need lower taxes and fewer regulations in order to be competitive.

These positions are absurd on their face. By flooding our democracy with their shareholders’ money, big corporations are violating their shareholders’ First Amendment rights because shareholders aren’t consulted. They’re simultaneously suppressing the First Amendment rights of the rest of us because, given how much money they’re throwing around, we don’t have enough money to be heard.

And they’re indirectly giving non-Americans (that is, all their foreign owners, investors, and executives) a say in how Americans are governed. Pardon me for being old-fashioned but I didn’t think foreign money was supposed to be funneled into American elections.

Romney’s belief big corporations need more money and lower costs in order to create jobs is equally baffling. Big corporations are now sitting on $2 trillion of cash and enjoying near-record profits. The ratio of profits to wages is higher than it’s been since before the Great Depression. And a larger and larger portion of those profits are going to top executives. (CEO pay was 40 times the typical worker in the 1980s; it’s now upwards of 300 times.)

But, hey, if the Supreme Court and regressive Republicans insist big corporations are people and want to treat them as American citizens, then why not demand big corporations take a pledge of allegiance to the United States?

And if they don’t take the pledge, we should boycott them. (Occupiers — are you listening?)

Here’s what a Corporate Pledge of Allegiance might look like:

The Corporate Pledge of Allegiance to the United States

The [fill in blank] company pledges allegiance to the United States of America. To that end:

We pledge to create more jobs in the United States than we create outside the United States, either directly or in our foreign subsidiaries and subcontractors.

If we have to lay off American workers, we will give them severance payments equal to their weekly wage times the number of months they’ve worked for us.

We further pledge that no more than 20 percent of our total labor costs will be outsourced abroad.

We pledge to keep a lid on executive pay so no executive is paid more than 50 times the median pay of American workers. We define “pay” to include salary, bonuses, health benefits, pension benefits, deferred salary, stock options, and every other form of compensation.

We pledge to pay at least 30 percent of money earned in the United States in taxes to the United States. We won’t shift our money to offshore tax havens and won’t use accounting gimmicks to fake how much we earn.

We pledge not to use our money to influence elections.

Companies that make the pledge are free to use it in their ads over the Christmas shopping season.

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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, Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future, is now in bookstores. His earlier book, “Supercapitalism,” is out in paperback. For copies of his articles, books, and public radio commentaries, go to www.RobertReich.org.

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This entry originally appeared at Robert Reich’s 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.

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Early last Friday morning, as the Occupy Wall Street protesters were just uncurling from their sleeping bags, I went downtown for a walkthrough of their campsite at Zuccotti Park, now also known as Liberty Plaza. I met up there with AFL-CIO President Rich Trumka and New York City Central Labor Council President Vincent Alvarez. (I’m president of an AFL-CIO affiliated union.)

There were just a few of us in our group, and as the sun burned through the dawn’s chill, not much attention was paid as we took the tour. We kept our voices low and walked carefully, doing our best to keep from tripping over and waking those who were still asleep

One or two reporters hooked up with us, not including the kid you may have seen with the fake cardboard Fox News camera and microphone, who tossed out questions as he walked along behind us. That was the extent of the media coverage.

Every once in a while someone would ask who Trumka was and he would stop and chat. At the end of our visit, he sat with a group at the west end of the park, across from ground zero, and quietly offered encouragement, discussing strategy, goals and on a practical level, the essentials needed to keep the protest going.

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This is a fateful week for financial regulation and the financial system.

European leaders are trying to reach a consensus on how to give Greece some breathing room to salvage its economy and to recapitalize the continent’s banks. Since the banks are heavily invested in Greek bonds, the more relief the Europeans give Greece, the more they will have to spend recapitalizing their own banks.

Meanwhile, on this side of the Atlantic, regulators are grappling with two momentous issues: how to implement the so-called Volcker Rule, which seeks to limit the ability of federally insured banks to engage in inherently speculative trading activity; and how to carry out another key section of the Dodd-Frank Act, which gives regulators the authority to take over large failing financial institutions.

The Financial Stability Oversight Council, a body created by Dodd-Frank made up of senior bank regulators, is meeting today on the issue of how to deal with failing banks. Meanwhile, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation is issuing regulations to carry out the Volcker Rule. (more…)