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Dave Johnson

By Dave Johnson
Fellow with Campaign for America’s Future

In 1983 NY hotel-chain-owning billionaire Leona Helmsley said, “We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes…” As our country migrates from democracy to plutocracy, this more and more appears to be official policy. Again and again we see tax cuts for the wealthy few, tax breaks and subsidies for the big corporations that operate as fronts for those wealthy few, and budget cuts for the things We, the People (government) do to empower and protect each other. Just a few weeks ago we watched as an extension of the Bush tax cuts and a huge cut in the estate tax rate was pushed through. Now we watch as the discussion turns to cuts in Social Security and the rest of the so-called “safety net.”

Another indicator of plutocracy (government of, by and for the wealthy) is impunity for those at the top. Leona Helmsley actually went to jail for tax evasion. Even as recently as the early-90s Savings and Loan Crisis our government investigated, prosecuted and jailed more than a thousand bad actors for fraud and other crimes. This time, well, … not so much. Well … actually not at all. Times have changed. Don’t look back. Deal with it. Suck it up. Let’s all get on the same team and keep this ball moving forward down the field at the end of the day. Whatever. Hey, look over there! (more…)

David Sirota

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

Over the years, we’ve all seen solid examples of the Versailles mentality in our media — ie. the mentality that glorifies Washington and its inhabitants as heroes saving the rest of America from itself. But usually these examples are a bit subtle in how they weave the arrogance into the prose. Usually, you have to really stop and do a careful double-take when you see a piece of Versailles propaganda.

That’s why this recent piece from the notoriously servile Matt Bai in the New York Times is such a groundbreaker. Never have I seen such a monumentally blatant piece of Versailles triumphalism. In that sense, it is truly The Versailles Manifesto. Here are the key excerpts to show you what I mean:

“In theory, all the people who populate the federal government, whether as senators or midlevel bureaucrats, are on loan from other places, often doing the nation’s business at the cost of more lucrative or convenient opportunities back home.”

“Plenty of people don’t like [Rahm] Emanuel, and plenty more don’t like his politics. But whatever one thinks of the man, it’s indisputable that he has spent most of his adult life doing the people’s work.”

“Had the elections board counted that against him, whether or not he had set foot back in Chicago for months at time, it would have lent credence to the destructive idea that there is Washington and there is the rest of us.”

In the first example, Bai asks us to ignore the revolving door between government and business, whereby many politicians invest time in Congress to then cash in on that time as lobbyists. Nothing to see there, he says — we are asked to believe that instead, most D.C. pols are making a noble sacrifice to serve the public “at the cost of more lucrative or convenient opportunities back home.” (more…)

Sam Pizzigati

By Sam Pizzigati
Editor, “Too Much”

The rich, many Americans have come to believe, rule. But how? The current hubbub over the federal budget deficit opens a welcome window to understanding just how our rich keep riding so high.

How can you tell whether you live in a plutocracy? Easy. Just conduct this simple test. First, identify a “pressing problem” that pundits are splashing over your nation’s op-ed pages. Then take a glance at the “solutions” to this national woe that pop up, on these same op-ed pages, as “politically possible.”

If you live in a plutocracy, not one of these “politically possible” proposals will ever do more than, at worst, inconvenience your nation’s super rich.

Ready to put this plutocracy test to a real-life trial? Let’s consider the problem that America’s pundits have this fall tabbed as our nation’s most pressing: the federal budget deficit.

Earlier this month, the New York Times offered readers an interactive online opportunity to solve this deficit situation. Our national newspaper of record published a long list of deficit-cutting options, all culled from Washington insiders, and invited readers to choose enough of these options to end the deficit. (more…)

Leo W. Gerard

By Leo W. Gerard
USW International President

Real men, real human beings, with feelings and families, fought and died at Gettysburg to preserve the Union, to ensure, as their president, Abraham Lincoln, would say later, that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Perversely, afterwards, non-humans commandeered the constitutional amendment intended to protect the rights of former slaves. Corporations wrested from the U.S. Supreme Court a decision based on the 14^th Amendment asserting that corporations are people with rights to be upheld by the government – but with no counterbalancing human responsibilities to the republic. No duty to fight or die in war, for example.  Earlier this year, the Supreme Court expanded those rights – ruling that corporations have a First Amendment free speech right to surreptitiously spend unlimited money on political campaigns.

Today, Lincoln would have to say America’s got a government of the people by the corporations, for the corporations.

The proposed trade agreement with South Korea illustrates corporate control of government for profit. It’s the same with efforts to revive the moribund trade schemes former President George W. Bush also negotiated with Panama and Colombia, the world’s most dangerous country by far for trade unionists, with 2,700 assassinated with impunity in the past two decades, 38 slain so far this year.

Nobody likes these trade deals – except corporations. They’re all modeled on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), both of which killed American jobs while giving corporations new authority to sue governments (read: taxpayers) for regulations – like environmental standards – that corporations contend interfere with their right to make money.

The Economic Policy Institute estimates that the South Korea so-called Free Trade Agreement (FTA) would cost America 159,000 jobs and enlarge its trade deficit by $16.7 billion in its first seven years.

Americans, now suffering though corporate-caused 9.6 percent unemployment, know a deal when they see one – and the South Korea FTA is not one. In a September poll by NBC News and the Wall Street Journal, 53 percent of Americans said so-called free trade agreements have injured the country. Only 17 percent said those trade schemes benefited the United States. Disgust with these deals spans party lines, including Tea Partiers, 61 percent of whom said they’re bad for America.

Many politicians, particularly Democrats, abhor the schemes as well. In July, just after President Obama announced that he would try to get the South Korea pact passed, 110 House Democrats described their disdain for the deal:

“We oppose specific provisions of the agreement in the financial services, investment, and labor chapters, because they benefit multi-national corporations at the expense of small businesses and workers.”

In addition, during this fall’s midterm election campaign, 205 candidates, Republican and Democrat, ran on platforms condemning job off-shoring and unfair trade, and house Democrats who ran on fair trade were three times as likely to survive the GOP “shellacking” as Democrats who supported so-called free trade schemes.

Significantly, the South Korean public and some South Korean politicians also oppose the trade proposal. In the week leading up to the G-20 meetings in Seoul, trade unionists, farmers, peasants and students filled the streets in marches and candle light vigils to express outrage with the proposed agreement, including its provisions giving U.S. corporations the right to challenge South Korean laws in private tribunals.

In October, 35 South Korean lawmakers joined 20 U.S. Representatives in writing President Obama and Korean President Lee Myunk-bak to protest the proposal.

Despite all that opposition, when Obama and Lee emerged from talks without an agreement, the American press, pundits and “analysts on both sides of the aisle,” described the situation as a major diplomacy failure, “a serious setback for the president.”

They were wrong. It wasn’t a setback for Obama. It was the president refusing to sign a bad deal for American workers.

It was, however, a humiliation for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which just spent at least $50 million from secret corporate donors to elect Republicans who will do its bidding. The South Korea deal is a priority for the Chamber. Here’s what Chamber senior vice president for international affairs Myron Brilliant told the New York Times after the South Korean negotiations broke down and Obama pledged to attempt to complete the deal over the following six weeks:

“This will be an early test for this president with the new Congress, particularly the House leadership.”

The “Brilliant” test is whether the president of the United States will comply with Chamber demands to complete trade deals that kill jobs and that Americans despise.

When Obama went to Seoul, Chamber President Thomas J. Donohue was there to, as he put it, help win the trade deal. He also was among 120 executives given exclusive access to international leaders including German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Russian President Dmitri A. Medvedev in a conference before the G-20 meeting.

The international organizers didn’t invite to the trade talks or the conference the students,  farmers, environmental groups, organized labor and untold millions of individuals who oppose the so-called free trade deals. The human beings who will be hurt most by the trade deals didn’t get a seat at the table. The corporate-people who stand to gain everything did.

Brilliant’s comments express the corporate sense of entitlement. They spent tens of millions to get what they wanted from politicians to increase profits. Now they expect it to be delivered.  It’s their recompense, their corporate reward.

If fatter profits mean fewer American jobs and wider trade deficits, that’s simply not a problem for corporations. That’s among the perks corporations got when the Supreme Court awarded them the privileges of personhood in America but none of the pesky personal and patriotic responsibilities of actual people in American society.

***

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.

Leo W. Gerard

By Leo W. Gerard
USW International President

Republican fund-raisers are treating Americans like little children, as if the GOP knows best and must shelter the youngsters from the truth.

It’s like when a kindergartner asks his father if mommy is coming home soon, and the widower replies that she’s on a long business trip. The parent is attempting to shield the child from the cruel truth, afraid the little one can’t handle it.

That’s what Republican campaign fund-raising groups are doing by concealing their donors from the public. The GOP does not trust Americans to handle the information. Republican operatives want to shield voters from knowing who is actually paying for GOP attack ads. The GOP fears the consequences if Americans know the truth – exactly which giant corporations and Wall Street banksters are funding vicious screeds against Democrats because those covert donors believe Republicans will deliver for big business.

The secret GOP benefactors are right about one thing: A Republican majority will work for the rich. In a study of income growth post WWII, Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels determined that earnings rose faster at all income levels under Democratic administrations, but especially for the middle class and the poor. Under Republican presidents, the wealthiest benefited the most, increasing income inequality.

After the conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court struck down decades of precedent in January in its Citizens United ruling, defining corporations as “persons” and permitting them to pour unlimited cash into political advertising, Democrats offered legislation to temper that newly-granted corporate power. Called the DISCLOSE Act – for Democracy Is Strengthened by Casting Light on Spending in Elections — it would have required revelation of corporate donations.

Republicans wanted concealment of their corporate sources, however, and scuttled the DISCLOSE Act. This freed private political fund-raising groups to take as much money as they can from corporations while providing a cloak of anonymity.

The Republican and Democratic parties still must disclose donors, and unions like the United Steelworkers (USW), which get their political action committee contributions from American members, must provide detailed information on how much they spend, which candidates they support, and the names of people who supply in-kind services as well as the value of the services.

The story of health insurers’ disclosed contributions to political parties reveals why Republicans prefer to keep Americans in the dark about gifts to GOP private fund-raising groups.

Public reports show that last year, the health insurance industry split its donations  between the two parties, but this year, after passage of health insurance reform, the contributions are running three to one for Republicans. The insurance corporations have made their demands clear to Republican beneficiaries. They want Republicans to retain in the law the financial windfalls for insurance corporations – that would be mandates that uninsured Americans get coverage and fines for those who don’t.  And they want Republicans to delete aspects that will cost insurance companies – that would be benefits for Americans like requirements that insurers cover sick children and injunctions against dropping policy holders when they get sick.

Wendell Potter, a former executive at Cigna Corp., one of the nation’s largest health insurance corporations, told Noam N. Levey of the Chicago Tribune:

“The industry would love to have a Republican Congress. They were very, very successful during the years of Republican domination in Washington.”

Voters need to know that insurance corporations overwhelmingly favor Republicans and what the industry expects to get from the GOP. But Americans will not know how much money insurers and other corporations give to shadowy Republican fund-raising groups and what those donors demand.

A New York Times investigation provided some insight into one GOP shadow group, the American Future Fund. It has spent $6 million so far on ads attacking Democrats in 13 states.  The Times discovered that Bruce Rastetter, CEO of Hawkeye Energy Holdings, one of the nation’s largest corn-based ethanol companies, provided the seed money for American Future Fund. The Times determined that American Future Fund money is funding ads to defeat Democrats who sit on legislative committees that directly affect the ethanol industry and agricultural subsidies.

Two other secretive Republican groups, American Crossroads GPS and the so-called U.S. Chamber of Commerce, plan to spend $145 million to crush Democrats while concealing their funding sources from Americans.

American Crossroads GPS, brainchild of Republican operative Karl Rove, plans to spend $70 million. Mel Sembler, a shopping mall magnate, told the New York Times that wealthy donors have given the GPS group six and seven-figure checks, and Republicans said one donor, who they refused to name, gave several million dollars. Sembler told the Times why clandestine giving is so attractive to corporations:

“They want to be able to be helpful but not be seen by the public as taking sides.”

What they don’t want to be seen doing is lining their pockets by buying Republican politicians. Neither do the Republican beneficiaries.

Like GPS, the so-called U.S. Chamber of Commerce is an elephant-sized player in the secretive Republican support game. It has spent $25 million on more than 8,000 ads slamming Democrats and backing corporate Republican candidates. It plans to spend $50 million more.

Oddly, the commerce group calls itself the U.S. Chamber while admitting foreign firms and soliciting funds from corporations in places like Bahrain, India and Singapore whose interests may conflict with those of American companies and American citizens. An investigation by Think Progress, a project of the non-partisan Center for American Progress Action Fund, revealed that the so-called U.S. Chamber has accepted at least $885,000 from 84 foreign firms, money that it placed in the same account from which it draws funds to sponsor ads attacking Democratic candidates.

The so-called U.S. Chamber denied that it illegally co-mingles money it gets from foreign corporations with funds it uses to attack Democrats. When Think Progress and others asked the so-called U.S. Chamber to divulge the account’s firewall to the public, the so-called U.S. Chamber responded by repeating its assurance that it does nothing wrong and asserting, “We are not obligated to discuss our internal procedures.”

Basically, the so-called U.S. Chamber is saying, “trust us,” to the American public. On the other hand, the “U.S. Chamber” and groups like American Crossroads GPS don’t trust the American public to know their donor lists. What they don’t trust is that Americans will do what the GOP wants on Nov. 2 if Republicans’ corporate donors are exposed.

The USW challenges the “U.S. Chamber” and GOP funding groups like American Crossroads GPS to show their trust in the American people by disclosing their donors.

***

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.

Some special interests would have us believe that the Obama administration has failed in its efforts toward recovery from the recession.  Those whose actions may properly be said to have caused the recession are even trying to deny that there was a recession.

The recent report from the National Business Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), states that this recession, the longest one since WWII, and which began in December 2007, began recoverery in June 2009.

It also states that two previous post-war recessions, each lasting 16 months, occurred in 1973-75 (Nixon and Ford administrations) and 1981-82 (Reagan administration).

An analysis of the report by Catherine Rampell appears in the NYT. In this article, take particular note that one member of the committee is quoted as saying, ”…the lag between a turnaround in gross domestic product and a turnaround in the job market was even worse after the 2001 recession.”

In other words, there were two recessions during the Bush administration, one starting in 2001 and the second in 2007, and the job market recovered even more slowly after the 2001 recession than in the current recession.

While Republican politicians would have us believe that they are the experts on the economy, the fact that the three worst recessions since WWII occurred during Republican administrations cannot be denied and should not be ignored.  It would be interesting to hear those “experts” explain how the worst recessions in the last half century all occurred under Republican administrations.

We should be grateful to President Obama and his economic advisors for their role in lessening the effects of what could have been a much worse recession.
Leo Toribio
Pittsburgh, PA

Leo Toribio

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Leo W. Gerard

By Leo W. Gerard
USW International President

Long-suffering victim is hardly the American image.  Paul Revere, Mother Jones, John Glenn, Martin Luther King Jr. — those are American icons. Bold, wry, justice-seeking.

So how is it that America finds herself in the position of schoolyard patsy, woe-is-me casualty of China’s illegal trade practices that are destroying U.S. renewable energy manufacturing and foreclosing an energy-independent future?

Come on, America. Show some of that confident pioneer spirit. Stand up for yourself. Tell China that America isn’t going to hand over its lunch money anymore; international trade law will be enforced now.

That’s the demand the United Steelworkers (USW) union made this week when it filed a 5,800-page suit detailing how China violates a wide variety of World Trade Organization (WTO) obligations.

80 boxes containing USW trade case being delivered to U.S. Trade Representative

The case, now in the hands of the U.S. Trade Representative, shows how China uses illegal land grants, prohibited low-interest loans and other outlawed measures to pump up its renewable energy industries and facilitate export of those products at artificially low prices to places like the United States and Europe.

The U.S. aids renewable energy industries, like solar cell and wind turbine manufacturers, but no where near the extent that China does. And the American aid lawfully goes to renewable manufacturers that produce for domestic consumption. China, by contrast, illegally subsidizes industries that export, a strategy that kills off competition.

The USW recognizes and appreciates that trade with China has lifted millions there out of poverty. But truly fair trade would benefit workers in both China and the United States. And that is what the USW is demanding.

The USW is far from alone in accusing China of violations. New York Times reporter Keith Bradsher described them in a story Sept. 8, titled “On Clean Energy, China Skirts Rules.” It ends with this quote from Zhao Feng, general manger of Hunan Sunzone Optoelectronics, a two-year-old solar panel manufacturer that exports nearly 95 percent of its products to Europe and is opening offices in three U.S. cities to push into the American market:

“Who wins this clean energy race really depends on how much support the government gives.”

The U.S. isn’t providing support that violates WTO regulations. China is. And it’s  hundreds of billions — $216 billion from China’s stimulus package, another $184 billion to be spent through 2020, $172 million in research and development over the past four years.

Bradsher’s story details illegal aid given Sunzone and says that it’s common, not exceptional. It includes China turning over land to Sunzone for a third of the market price and government-controlled banks granting Sunzone low-interest loans that the provincial government helps Sunzone repay.

In addition, the USW suit notes that China, which accounts for 93 percent of the world’s production of so-called rare earth materials like dysprosium and terbium essential for green energy technology, has severely restricted their export. That practice, illegal under WTO rules, forces some foreign companies to move manufacturing to China to get access.

And when corporations move, China routinely – and illegally — mandates they transfer technology to Chinese partners, which often means U.S.-tax-dollar-supported research and development benefits China.

That is one reason China rose to first in the world in clean energy so quickly.  China now leads globally in producing solar panels. It doubled its wind power capacity in one year – 2009. Worldwide, Chinese manufacturers supply at least half of all hydropower projects and fabricate 75 percent of all compact fluorescent light bulbs.

Meanwhile, here in the United States, BP shut down its solar panel manufacturing plant in Maryland this year and Evergreen Solar of Marlboro, Mass., plans to close its American plant, eliminating 300 U.S. jobs. Both are moving manufacturing to China.

Germany’s Solar World still manufactures in Europe and the United States, and its chief executive, Frank A. Asbeck, told Bradsher the German solar industry association is investigating whether to file a suit of its own to try to stop China’s illegal practices:

“China is cordoning off its own solar market to fend off international competition while arming its industry with a bottomless pile of subsidies and boundless lines of credit.”

The Times story also says China’s “aggressive government policies” are designed to ensure “Chinese energy security.”

China’s illegal aggression to secure its energy independence and dominate world production of green technology threatens the energy security of the United States.

America turned to renewables not just to diminish climate change but also to reduce dependence on foreign oil, an addiction that has entangled the U.S. in costly and bloody wars.

If the United States can’t build its own renewable energy products, it will forfeit the next generation high technology industry and good manufacturing jobs, and it will remain dangerously beholden to foreign nations for energy.

China agreed to follow international regulations when it joined the World Trade Organization. This pledge was crucial because China’s economy is government-controlled, very different from the free market economies of the United States and most Western nations.

Faced with blatant rule-flouting that has cost USW members their jobs and threatens to cost their children high-technology manufacturing of the future, the USW is demanding the American government put a stop to it.

That is how a true American acts. Americans have a sense of justice. They follow the rules and expect trading partners to do the same. When they don’t, Americans do something about it.

Robert Kuttner

Robert Kuttner
Co-Founder and Co-Editor of The American Prospect

When you think about it, Alan (“Tits”) Simpson is the ideal jester to deflect attention from the bigger joke — the fiscal reform commission itself. The problem is less Simpson’s dopey comments and more the idiocy of the rest of the commission.

Given what is happening to the real economy in the real world, the prospect of a double-dip recession and the prospect of a lost decade of high unemployment, the idea that the bigger menace is Social Security is just whacko. Let’s recall that Social Security is in surplus until 2037!

Yet the idea that the road to recovery leads though cuts in Social Security, Medicare, and other social outlays that are keeping the depression from worsening, if anything, is gaining traction among opinion elites.

Exhibit A is a doubly dishonest column by the New York Times‘ new whiz-kid pundit, Matt Bai, who used a liberal congressman, Earl Blumenauer of Oregon, as a prop to make his misleading case.

According to Bai’s column, Security is like a giant lottery, based on IOU’s that will require a Ponzi Scheme of further debt. Now, it turns out that Bai is not just wrong on the issues, but Blumenauer doesn’t believe what Bai attributed to him. In attacking the progressive coalition Strengthen Social Security, Bai wrote:
The coalition bases its case on the idea that Social Security is actually in fine fiscal shape, since it has amassed a pile of Treasury Bills — often referred to as i.o.u.’s — in a dedicated trust fund. This is true enough, except that the only way for the government to actually make good on these i.o.u.’s is to issue mountains of new debt or to take the money from elsewhere in the federal budget, or perhaps impose significant tax increases… So this is sort of like saying that you’re rich because your friend has promised to give you 10 million bucks just as soon as he wins the lottery.

But this is total malarkey. In fact, the 75-year projection of Social Security’s finances shows that under fairly pessimistic assumptions about economic growth, the shortfall in Social Security’s finances is just over half of one percent of GDP. Lift the cap on earnings subject to Social Security taxes, and the problem disappears.

More importantly, get wage growth back to its historic trend of increasing as productivity increases (rather than the top getting the benefit of all the economic gains) and the problem vanishes without changing the tax code. Raise wages, and we could increase Social Security benefits.

Bai not only distorted the reality of Social Security, but he also distorted Blumenauer’s views, cherry picking quotes from two interviews to make it seem that the congressman favored such drastic measures promoted by deficit hawks as cutting benefits or raising the retirement age. But the quotes in the column don’t say that — only Bai’s gloss on them — and the congressman believes nothing of the sort.

The trouble is that too many legislators make Delphic comments about whether Social Security should be “on the table,” Bluenenauer’s past vagueness gave Bai an opening, and Bai is all too representative of opinion elites — including the Washington Post editorial page, columnists like David Broder, many Democratic as well as Republican congressmen, and some in the Obama administration.

It was former Budget Director Peter Orszag, seconded by chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and the pollsters, who persuaded President Obama that the fiscal commission was a good idea. The theory was that the commission would give the president “cover” and demonstrate that he was fiscally responsible.

But as events have played out, this premise totally backfired. The commission provides plenty of cover all right, as in burial cloth. Its proposals could bury both the economy and this presidency.

The commission has given a platform to clowns like Simpson. But worse, it has lent credibility to the idea that Social Security is somehow a drag on the economy — creating a vicious circle of hawkish legislators and dishonest pundits like Bai feeding on each other.

The reality, of course, is that if the economy (and Obama’s fortunes) are going down the drain, the reason has nothing to do with Social Security’s finances in 2037 — and everything to do with slow growth, high unemployment, and the lingering effects of a damaged banking system right now.

Yet the storyline being peddled by the commission, of a dire fiscal crisis, makes it politically more difficult for Obama to take the necessary steps to get a recovery going.

There is a whole other path to economic recovery and fiscal balance. That other path has five parts:

• A lot more emergency federal spending now to create jobs and purchasing power.
• Increased taxes on the top two percent.
• A continued program of public investment in physical and social infrastructure
• A real public option on health insurance, to restrain medical inflation, which is the prime driver of federal deficits in the long run.
• A defense of Social Security as a key source of income for the elderly.

This strategy is better economics and better politics. Voters, by overwhelming margins, support Social Security. Over the years, Republicans have tried to tamper with it. And it is lunacy for Democrats to associate themselves with efforts to cut it.

But Obama’s own fiscal commission has painted the president into a corner. Virtually all of the remedies we need to get a strong recovery going are seen as fiscally too costly; and willingness to go after Social Security is being touted as the test of fiscal responsibility.

The campaign to fire Simpson has the right spirit but the wrong target. Obama should draw a line in the sand and make clear that if the commissioners propose cuts in Social Security, he will consider the whole exercise tainted.

Maybe we should be grateful for Simpson and his 310 million tits. If his antics lead serious commentators take a closer look at the commission, perhaps they will also look deeper into the fiscal foolishness of Simpson’s colleagues.

***

Robert Kuttner is a senior fellow at Demos. His  new book is “A Presidency in Peril.” His other books include “Obama’s Challenge: America’s Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency.”

Dean Baker

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

In recent weeks there has been a serious effort by the conservatives and even many centrists to whip up anger at public sector workers over their pensions.  

Their basic line is that public sector workers get better pensions on average than their private sector counterparts.  At the same time, most state and local pension funds have large shortfalls, implying additional government revenue will be needed to keep them solvent.

This is supposed to make people really angry at public sector workers.  The Right Wing noise factory has been whipping up hostility against public employees, sensing they may have another ACORN on their hands.  A New York Times columnist even called on retired public employees to give back pensions for which they worked and have solid legal claims.

 We should recognize the attack on public sector workers for what it is: A sleazy case of scapegoating intended to divert people’s attention from the real villains in this economy, the Wall Street boys and the inept economic policymakers who took the economy — and peoples’ jobs, pensions and home mortgages — to ruin and seem intent on leaving it there. 

The basic facts are straightforward.  Adjusting for education and experience, public sector workers actually get paid slightly less on average than their counterparts in the private sector.  It is likely the lower pay is largely or fully offset by a better benefit package, but it is likely the difference in benefit packages between public and private sector workers is not as large as it may seem. (more…)

John Boehner has long been a thorn in the side of people like me, who would desperately like to find some signs of hope for the Republican Party.  When speaking, he tends to stand stiff, like a bratty child who is trying to imitate a mature adult, and his utterances tend to be nonsense. 
 
Here’s a link to an article by Gail Collins in the NYT on a recent interview of Boehner by the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.
  
And if you’re unfamiliar with Boehner’s meaningless posturing, and therefore incredulous about Ms. Collins’ report, here’s a link to the Trib’s article:
  
In the “best of all possible worlds,” wherein mostly everyone was reasoned and intelligent, a partisan rag like the Trib would have shelved this piece and it would not have gone to press on the grounds that it would be harmful to the Republican cause.  But they went to press with it anyway, not because they exercise journalistic impartiality, but because they are like Boehner, slothful and lacking diligence.  I canceled my subscription
to the Trib when they published a lengthy non-political article that was full of misspellings and factual errors, including the assertion that the Cathedral of Notre Dame, in Paris, France, was completed 300 years before construction was actually begun.

This time, they characterized Obama’s ban against deep-water drilling as a “blanket ban” on all drilling in the Gulf.  Do your homework, Trib!  Sadly, there are too many Americans who will echo Boehner’s senseless utterances without giving them any more thought than Boehner apparently has — just because he’s a Republican!

Leo Toribio
Pittsburgh, PA

Leo Toribio

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To submit a blog to Free Speech Zone, e-mail it to bstack@usw.org. Keep it to 250 words or fewer. You MUST include your full name, hometown, and state. You may attach a photograph of yourself. Please include a phone number. This WILL NOT be published. Posting any given blog is within the discretion of the USW.  No blog using foul language (this is a family site), false information (we don’t want to get sued), or unnecessary personal attacks (again, we don’t want to get sued) will be used. Wait a reasonable period of time, then blog again! This is a Free Speech Zone.