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By Jim Hightower
Author, Commentator, America’s Number One Populist

I didn’t know a whole lot about Chuck Hagel before President Obama nominated him to be the new Pentagon chief, but here’s one thing I’ve learned that I definitely like about him: He has the right enemies!

Leading the charge to stop Hagel is a gaggle of hyper-right-wing militarists. Dubbed the Vulcans (after the Roman god of fire), they were the gung-ho hawks who championed the Bush-Cheney regime’s in-your-face doctrine of pre-emptive war. They were raring to go into Iraq to grab those weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist, and now they’re raring to rush into Iran.

Well, by “raring to go,” I mean they’re hopped up to send other Americans into war, not themselves or their loved ones. They are gutless arm-chair warriors, including Bill Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Elliott Abrams–as well as Cheney himself–all of whom turned down the chance to be warriors in the Vietnam era. (more…)

David Sirota

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

The last time America found itself in a budget debate pitting domestic priorities against war expenditures, Richard Nixon was in the White House and David Obey was the youngest member of Congress – an anti-war liberal whose insurgent campaign unexpectedly vaulted him into the House seat vacated by the hawkish president’s new defense secretary. In those dark days, it was the guns of Vietnam and the Cold War versus the butter of the Great Society and the War on Poverty – and despite Obey’s protests, guns won the day.

“President Nixon issued a call to counterrevolution at home,” summed up Time magazine in 1973, noting that while the Republican administration was increasing the Pentagon budget, it was proposing the “abolition or deep cutting of more than 100 federal grant programs that have benefited the unemployed, students, farmers, veterans, small businessmen, the mentally ill and tenants in federally aided housing.”

The resulting body bags and cuts to homeland investment were, of course, devastating – which is why it is fitting that Obey is choosing to end his congressional tenure where he started it: on the side of butter in a 21st century reprisal of the ancient debate.

Over the last decade, Obey has been methodically campaigning against the war in Iraq and the endless Afghanistan occupation, saying their rationales are weak, their prosecution inept and their deficit-financed costs unaffordable in the face of unmet domestic needs. For years, he valiantly has championed bills to legislate withdrawal timetables and war surtaxes. Now, with President Obama pushing a plan to boost Afghan war funding at the potential expense of economic aid at home, Obey has replaced the scalpel strokes of proactive legislation with the blunt force of filibuster.

According to Politico, Obey last week “drew a direct link between war funding and progress on domestic priorities” with his announcement that as Appropriations Committee chairman, he will “withhold action on the war funds until there (is) some resolution on a major economic relief bill extending jobless benefits.”

Like clockwork, the move was met with hypocritical hysteria. The same Republican Party that bewails deficits responded with a letter asking Defense Secretary Robert Gates to champion the deficit-exploding war-funding bill in order to avoid “undermining” the military. Gates, despite just having called for defense spending cuts, obediently complied. “Gates to Congress: Stalling on War Funding Will Hurt U.S. Troops,” read the Fox News headline after he publicly echoed the GOP demands.

The Nation’s Chris Hayes has written that such tripe boils down to “You’re either with the war or you are against the troops” – and as the bloated Pentagon budget proves, that message has thwarted Obey for most of his life.

Until, perhaps, now.

Yes, just as Obey prepares to retire, there are signs that his crusade is winning converts. For instance, Oklahoma Republican Sen. Tom Coburn is using his position on President Obama’s deficit commission to focus attention on Pentagon profligacy. Similarly, Politico reports that “key tea party players (are) expressing a willingness to put the Pentagon budget on the chopping block.”

Whether or not the cacophony stops the Pentagon’s latest blank check is less important than Obey finally having rekindled an honest discussion about guns and butter. In a 41-year career of venerable accomplishments, that is the most profound achievement of all.

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David Sirota is a former spokesperson for the House Appropriations Committee. He is the bestselling author of the books “Hostile Takeover” (2006) and “The Uprising” (2008). E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com or follow him on Twitter @davidsirota. This is his latest column for Creators Syndicate.

David Sirota

 By David Sirota
Newspaper columnist, radio host, bestselling author 

This month, a British government report admitted that one of the major rationales for invading Iraq — the claim that Saddam could deploy WMDs in 45 minutes — probably came from a cab driver. Had the public originally been told about this sketchy sourcing, there may have been a more, ahem, forceful mass opposition to preemptive war in the Middle East.

It’s a good lesson about the need for transparency. We cannot fully snuff out spin, and we will never be able to guarantee perfect results from policy choices. But we can increase the chances for successful societal decision-making when we at least know the facts.

That’s the common sense rationale behind our sunshine laws. While courts say we can’t ban politicians from raising private money, we can force politicians to disclose who their benefactors are so that we know what they really represent. We may not bar sugary foods — but we do require nutrition labels so we can know what we are eating.

More often than not, this was the American compromise: We fought about regulations and mandates, but there had been consensus support for transparency.

“Had been,” mind you, is the key phrase — and the cab-driver-induced war is only the beginning.

In 2008, the New York Times’ David Barstow reported that 75 retired military officers regularly appearing on television “have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.”

Collectively, the group represented “more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants,” and here’s the kicker: “Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to viewers.”

Had networks reacted to Barstow’s blockbuster with better disclosure, we could have rested easy. Instead, the deceptions persist.

HuffPost recently showed how “major television networks continue to host retired generals as military analysts without alerting viewers to their extensive ties to defense contractors.”

Additionally, Wired magazine reports that neoconservative think-tankers who directly helped craft the Pentagon’s Afghan escalation are now appearing throughout the media as allegedly disinterested analysts of the escalation — again, without any mention of their concurrent work.

Considering the sometimes murky relationship between advertisers and newsrooms, it’s easy to think this opacity is the exclusive transgression of commercial media. Unfortunately, it’s not — it has bled into the country’s single most powerful economic institution, the Federal Reserve.

This is the bank currently lobbying against congressional oversight by arguing it must preserve its “independence” — the same institution whose regional board members are elected by the private banks they regulate and whose chairman, Ben Bernanke, quietly cavorts with the bank CEOs he’s supposed to be independent from. Even worse, the Fed is paying many of the ostensibly objective economists who sculpt the debate about Congress’s Fed policy.

HuffPost ace reporter Ryan Grim found that the Fed today doles out roughly $400 million a year for “research” — much of it to outside economists who then advocate for the Fed’s agenda without disclosing their Fed ties. For instance, seven of the eight economists on a recent anti-oversight letter to Congress failed to note they are or were on the Fed’s payroll.

That blatant chicanery, though, is not the worst of it. The real subterfuge is how the Fed’s shadowy pay scheme bakes an invisible pro-Fed consensus into our public discourse. Through its academic largesse, Grim notes the Fed “so thoroughly dominates the field of economics that real criticism of the central bank has become a career liability for members of the profession.”

Ronald Reagan, of course, warned us to “trust, but verify.” It was good advice, except for one hitch: What happens when the verifiers are the ones who can no longer be trusted?

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David Sirota is the author of the best-selling books “Hostile Takeover” and “The Uprising.” He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado and blogs at OpenLeft.com. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com or follow him on Twitter @davidsirota.

Robert Kutner

By Robert Kutner
Co-Founder and Co-Editor of The American Prospect

Barack Obama may soon find that he is committing a big sin against one of the major premises of the reigning ideology. As part of his plan to restructure the auto industry, rebuild infrastructure, and create new green industries and jobs, he will be committing industrial policy. And this will create a head-on collision with one of the cherished dogmas of market fundamentalism — “free trade.”

This clash is long overdue. For several decades, American elites of both parties have been preaching the same gospel of free trade. Supposedly, if we just leave markets alone, different countries will produce and export what they naturally do best, and import products at which their partners excel. In the tidy and oversimplified textbook world, there is no room for questions about pollution, labor standards, product safety, financial engineering, or industrial policy.

But the real world doesn’t work like the Econ. 101 fable. In much of the rest of the world, governments help their industries develop.

However, in the hierarchy of America’s diplomatic priorities, countries like China that subsidize industries (and violate human rights) get a free pass. Other nations like Japan, that basically closed their borders to most imports for several decades while they became industrial powerhouses, got a seal of approval, too. Supposedly, what we lose in jobs and industries, we make up in cheap imports.

While other nations care about what they produce, the United States disdains having industrial policies, in order to set a good example. Indeed, we have been the principal architect of the World Trade Organization, which discourages government involvement in economic development as an illicit thumb on the free-trade scale.

Now, with the crash of 2008, it is clear that the US economy was built on a financial mirage. Our reliance on asset bubbles – inflated stock and real estate prices – disguised the fact that we were not paying our way. Much of our prosperity was simply borrowed.

Having let so many industries and jobs just go offshore, we don’t make enough to pay for our imports. Instead, we have been relying on loans from foreign central banks to finance our trade imbalance.

Looking at this economic calamity, President-elect Obama has proposed several sensible policies. He wants the U.S. auto industry to reinvent itself, with government aid and government standards. He wants to incubate other domestic industries around the goal of clean energy. And he wants to spend serious money on all of this, to help avoid a depression. The only historical counterpart is the vast industrial mobilization of World War II, which finally cured the Great Depression.

But these ideas about government involvement in the economy violate the sacred dogma of free trade. If the Obama administration is serious about reviving American manufacturing industry, it is only a matter of time before a foreign government hauls the U.S. before the World Trade Organization and charges us with the crime of industrial policy.

To quote our beloved leader George W. Bush in a different context, bring it on. The current version of the W.T.O., designed by and for US multinational corporations to make it easier to outsource jobs and production, has not served the national interest. It is indeed time to use industrial policy to rebuild long neglected domestic industries; and if something has to give, let it be the W.T.O.

As a mark of the total intellectual muddle in how policymakers have thought about these issues, the fact is that we have several implicit industrial policies. For instance, American commercial leadership in aerospace is no naturally occurring phenomenon. It reflects trillions of dollars of subsidy from the Pentagon and from NASA. Likewise, U.S. dominance in pharmaceuticals is the result of government subsidy of basic research, favorable patent treatment, and the fact that the American consumer of prescription drugs is made to overpay, giving the industry exorbitant profits to plow back into research. Throwing $700 billion at America’s wounded banks is also an industrial policy

So if we can have implicit industrial policies for these industries, why not explicit policies to rebuild our auto industry, our steel industry, our machine tool industry, and the industries of the next century such as green energy and high-speed rail? And why not devise some clear standards for which industries deserve help, and why, and what they owe America in return?

The new administration is already a bit schizophrenic on the subject. On the one hand, President-elect Obama has been saying bold things about building the industries of the future. On the other hand, he just appointed as America’s top trade official Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk, a man with no serious diplomatic experience and one whose main claim to fame on the trade issue is that he has been a big booster of NAFTA, a badly flawed deal that Obama has pledged to reopen.

Kirk’s appointment was meant to signal that Obama will not challenge the current orthodoxy on trade policy. It was cheered by the U.S. business establishment. What is truly bizarre is that Obama’s reported first choice for the job was California Congressman Xavier Becerra, a critic of NAFTA and other recent trade deals. Kirk will also vehemently disagree on trade and industry with Obama’s new labor secretary-designate, Rep. Hilda Solis, another NAFTA critic.

Maybe, like Lincoln, Obama has the genius to fuse this “team of rivals” into an effective administration; perhaps he will listen to the divergent advice and forge the best course. When the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin coined that phrase to describe Lincoln’s manner of governing, she was referring to the fact that Lincoln literally brought into his cabinet men who had been Lincoln’s rivals for the Republican presidential nomination in 1860. These were people of real stature and of fierce differences, representing a party that was badly fractured on the key issues of how to save the union and whether to free the slaves.

Obama has prided himself building bridges and transcending ideology. We are now beginning to see what that means in practice–a cabinet that represents people of thoroughly contradictory views, with some members who are public figures of real consequence and others who are surprisingly weak. This pattern puts all the more pressure on Obama himself to create coherence out of the stew.

Despite these gestures of broad inclusion, there is no escaping the fact that Obama must quickly make some difficult decisions about which path to follow. And one path precludes another. He can’t have both his industrial policies and his free trade.

Robert Kuttner’s new bestselling book is “Obama’s Challenge: America’s Economic Policy and the Power of a Transformative Presidency.”

Robert Kuttner’s new bestselling book is “Obama’s Challenge: America’s Economic Policy and the Power of a Transformative Presidency.”

Column first published on The Huffington Post

By Jim English
International Secretary-Treasurer

Marketing Myths vs. Hard Realities
The political hucksters who market presidential candidates are shameless about the myths they create.
Ronald Reagan was pitched as a former union president who understood working Americans. Instead, he fired striking air traffic controllers and ignited a quarter century of corporate union busting.
George Bush, Sr. was sold as “kindler” and “gentler,” but kept up the attack on union workers.
His son was marketed as a regular guy. Instead he’s regularly stuck it to labor unions while doing Wall Street’s bidding.
Now John McCain is being promoted as a super straight shooter with a record of distinguished service – everything that George Bush hasn’t been.
There’s no question that John McCain suffered as a prisoner of war. But there are plenty questions about just how straight he’s being about his record as a candidate for president. (more…)