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Polls show Americans angrier and more polarized than at any time since the Vietnam War. That’s not surprising. We have the worst economy since the Great Recession and the worst politics in living memory. The rise of the regressive right over the last three decades has finally spurred a progressive reaction. Occupiers and others have had enough.

Yet paradoxically the presidential race that officially begins a few months from now is likely to be as passionless as they come.

President Obama will be supported by progressives and the Democratic base, but without enthusiasm. His notorious caves to Republicans and Wall Street — failing to put conditions on the Street’s bailout (such as demanding the Street help stranded home owners), or to resurrect Glass-Steagall, or include a public option in health care, or assert his constitutional responsibility to raise the debt limit, or protect Medicare and Social Security, or push for cap-and-trade, or close Guantanamo, or, in general, confront the regressive Republican nay-sayers and do-nothings with toughness rather than begin negotiations by giving them much of what they want — are not the stuff that stirs a passionate following. (more…)

President Obama’s address to Congress tonight was really two speeches in one. The first laid out his jobs plan—substantively, an attempt to forestall a double-dip recession. The second laid out a longer-term economic vision that promised, however vaguely, to restore American manufacturing.

Politically, both plans are aimed at shoring up the president’s support within the Democratic base: the jobs plan by its relative expansiveness (compared to the low-ball estimates the White House was putting out earlier this week so that Democrats would be pleasantly surprised at the plan’s actual scope), the manufacturing plan by its promise to use state power, in some unspecified way, to help restore middle-class jobs.

Both plans are also aimed beyond the Democrats’ core constituencies, however. Parts of the jobs plan—certainly, the payroll tax cuts to both employers and employees—will be hard for the Republicans to oppose if Obama and the Democrats simply hammer home these proposals day after day. Similarly, the theme of restoring America’s manufacturing capacities (and not, as the president asserted, by competing in “a race to the bottom,” but rather “a race to the top”) should play well in places like the industrial Midwest—if, and only if, the president changes our trade policies that were key to our deindustrialization in the first place. (more…)

A response to President Obama’s jobs speech from the American Dream movement, delivered by Tiffany Mellers, an unemployed Army Reservist. The American Dream Movement is a growing movement inspired by protests in Wisconsin and fueled by the brutal right-wing attacks on the middle class and the poor. MoveOn.org, along with several organizations, have joined the American Dream Movement to fight to ensure that Americans have the opportunity to find a decent job, afford to go to college, and secure a future for our children and our communities.

As Social Security emerged as a target in White House budget negotiations, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) insisted that the retirement program must not be cut as part of any deficit reduction deal.

Social Security, which had been off the table in the deficit talks, reportedly reemerged as President Obama met with congressional leaders.

“Let us be clear,” Sanders said. “Social Security has not contributed one nickel to our deficit or our national debt. Social Security is funded by the payroll tax, not the U.S. treasury.” The program that benefits more than 50 million seniors and disabled has a $2.6 trillion surplus, he stressed, and will be able to provide full benefits for every eligible American for the next 25 years. (more…)

By Harold Meyerson
Editor-at-Large of The American Prospect

“You campaign in poetry and govern in prose” is a pretty fair adage for delineating the poles of political life, and it most surely delineates the poles of Barack Obama’s presidency. Few presidents have been able to evoke visions of a decent society as well as he, and particularly as well as he did in his speech yesterday afternoon at George Washington University. The America that Obama argued for is a socially cohesive America, a land where we rise and fall together as beneficiaries not only of our own labors but of the labors of others and the collective labors of the nation, fostered, funded and in some cases performed by its government.

“There are some things we can only do together as a nation,” Obama said. “We are a better country because of these commitments” — to seniors, children, the sick and the poor, through Medicare and Social Security and Medicaid. “I’ll go further,” he added, “we would not be a great country without these commitments.”

Obama’s vision was compelling not only in itself but in contrast to Paul Ryan’s punching bag of a budget proposal, which, by slashing taxes on the rich and transferring the burden of rising medical costs to seniors and the poor, could not have been better calibrated to discredit the plutocratic libertarianism that dominates current Republican thinking. “This is a vision,” Obama said of Ryan’s folly, “that says even though Americans can’t afford to invest in education or clean energy, even though we can’t afford to care for seniors or poor children, we can somehow afford more than $1 trillion in new tax breaks for the wealthy. … They want to give people like me a $200,000 tax cut that’s paid for by asking 33 seniors to each pay $6,000 more in health costs? That’s not right, and it’s not going to happen as long as I’m president.” (more…)

By Harold Meyerson
Editor-at-Large of The American Prospect

The key to understanding the Civil War, which began 150 years ago this week, is to realize that it’s still being fought. Indeed, it’s being fought now more intensely than at any time since the 1960s.

Then, African Americans and white Northern liberals and moderates battled Southern white segregationists and Goldwater conservatives to establish equal racial access to the ballot, housing and public facilities. Today’s battle more closely resembles the one that inaugurated the Civil War, which centered on the expansion of slavery to the lands west of the Mississippi. As in 1861, we are again divided over whether Southern or Northern labor systems, and Southern or Northern versions of government, shall become the national norm.

In the private-sector economy, the Southern labor system — in which workers are paid less and have fewer rights — has been winning for decades. Despite their huge growth in members during the 1930s and 1940s, unions never succeeded in penetrating the South, where white racial animosity toward blacks thwarted efforts to build working-class solidarity. The gap between Northern and Southern wages remained vast — so vast that many Northern companies began relocating facilities there, particularly after the civil rights revolution of the ’60s made the South seem less culturally foreign. (more…)

By Bill Scher
Executive editor of LiberalOasis.com

Last week, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce released a joint statement with the AFL-CIO supporting President Obama’s call for increased public investment in infrastructure, which read:

Whether it is building roads, bridges, high-speed broadband, energy systems and schools, these projects not only create jobs and demand for businesses, they are an investment in building the modern infrastructure our country needs to compete in a global economy.

That’s great. Now it’s time for the Chamber to tell it to all those Tea Partiers it helped get elected to Congress.

No outside group spent more to help Republicans take over than Congress than the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, dropping $31 million funneled from undisclosed donors on ads that attacked supporters of economic stimulus for spending recklessly and failing to create jobs.

Funny thing about that is: a major supporter of President Obama’s stimulus law was the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. But instead of backing lawmakers who helped the member companies of the Chamber from suffering a full-blown Great Depression, the Chamber decided to punish them because many also backed reform of health care and Wall Street. (more…)

By Bob Cesca
Author, “One Nation Under Fear”

There are a variety of explanations for the frustratingly backwards outcome of Tuesday’s election.

Clearly Americans were dissatisfied with the objective reality that the Obama administration and the congressional Democrats actually made things better by cutting the deficit by an historic $122 billion; creating upwards of three million new jobs; ending the war in Iraq; passing the largest middle class tax cut in history; and rescuing the economy from the brink of collapse. Not good enough, obviously.

Or did voters simply not know about these accomplishments? That’s entirely possible given the Democratic Party’s uncanny penchant for running away from its successes, while also fumbling very basic add-water-and-serve marketing chores. (And, by the way, adding to the party’s failures to ballyhoo its accomplishments, the progressive movement was systematically out-hustled, out-gunned and outmaneuvered for much of the last two years.)

Of course there’s also the Flailing Rage Factor, which I tend to favor as a reason for Tuesday’s outcome more than ignorance or lack of Democratic marketing chops. For two years now, Americans have been incited by fakery and horror stories to the point of being pumped up into a ‘roid raging mob chanting shallow platitudes and bumper sticker zingers — incoherently attacking Speaker Pelosi’s face, and bent out of shape by the fact that there’s not a doddering old white guy stumbling through the West Wing spinning grandfatherly yarns about American mornings and saintly cowboys.

Ultimately, what Americans voted for Tuesday was divided government, which admittedly isn’t new in American politics. We typically like the idea of two sides, Congress and the White House, locking horns and ultimately compromising on the important matters of the day.

Unfortunately, this is a “pre-01/20/09″ mindset. It’s a mass delusion based on antiquated political attitudes. (more…)

 

By Scott N. Paul
Executive Director Alliance for American Manufacturing

President Obama deserves credit for making a tough call on trade.  On September 11, he decided to impose tariffs on consumer tires from China for the next three years, resisting the pleas of most opinion elites across the nation and one of the principal financiers of our massive public debt: China’s government. 

Though many industries have been battered by imports from China, the safeguard mechanism permitted under rules China agreed to upon entering the World Trade Organization eight years ago has never been invoked before this month.  While the merits of the trade case filed by the United Steelworkers (USW) union seeking relief from a massive surge of imported Chinese consumer tires were quite clear, an absurd mythology has encompassed it.

Even though the International Trade Commission (ITC) recommended tariffs after hearing copious evidence from importers and the Chinese tire industry as well as from the USW (which represent tire workers), opponents of the tariffs still insist that the decision will be counterproductive, raising prices while creating jobs in other importing nations.  That is complete nonsense.  No other exporter can replace the market share of consumer tires that China currently holds.  Goodyear has indicated that it will invest $600 million in its American tire manufacturing facilities, making it highly likely that the tariffs will allow for some capital investments in the domestic tire industry and put tire workers back on the job.  Prices for tires—if they rise at all—will increase by $3 per tire according to the ITC, while the economic benefits to the nation, in the form of jobs and wages saved, taxes paid, and corporate profits—will more than double that. 

Some critics of the tariffs have pointed to potential retaliation by China against U.S.-produced chicken feet and auto parts.  This is merely bluster by Beijing, which is not normally held to account on trade issues.  For eight years, China has not faced serious sanctions for a beggar-thy-neighbor, mercantilist trade policy.  But remember this: China depends on access to the U.S. market for its own employment and growth, and will not ultimately risk its livelihood to make a point. 

Others believe that the outcome of this case will lead to the filing of even more import surge cases against China by industries such as textiles or steel.  The sad fact is that scores of American industries have seen an import surge from China.  While a few more cases may be in the offing, a far more likely outcome of the tire case is a serious bilateral negotiation between the U.S. and China to address a number of trade irritants, such as massive industrial subsidies, lack of market access, intellectual property theft, persistent dumping, and an exchange rate that most economists believe is dramatically undervalued and misaligned. 

Does anyone still believe it is a good thing to outsource not only our manufacturing but also our debt financing to China?  The tire decision alone will not change this equation, but it could chart a better course for America. 

Revitalizing manufacturing, reducing our trade imbalances and bringing down our public debt are interconnected.  The tire trade decision alone will not accomplish these goals, but it may lead lawmakers to embrace a new strategy to grow manufacturing in this nation.  Trade enforcement as articulated by President Obama is an essential component of that strategy, but it is only part of the equation.  We need a results-oriented trade policy, one that recognizes the importance of opening new markets as well as enforcing the rules.  It is refreshing to see a pragmatic national leader on trade after so many years of benign neglect.

***

This piece was first published in the Detroit News.

                                             

 

 

Tire, tariff, free trade, fair trade, manufacturing, President Barack Obama, China, United Steelworkers, USW, World Trade Organization, International Trade Commission, ITC, exports, Goodyear,

By Leo W. Gerard
International President

Let’s go back, just for a minute, to a time before screaming teabaggers, before Republicans decided to kill health insurance reform as a means to politically destroy this country’s first African-American president.

Try and remember what it was like before discussion of health insurance reform raised voices, a time when instead it raised concern. Recollect Aug. 7, 2007, during the Democratic primaries, when then-60-year-old retired and disabled steelworker Steve Skvara stood at a microphone during a political debate and told his story with tears in his eyes and a catch in his throat.

He’d worked more than 30 years at LTV Steel in East Chicago, Ind., and assumed like many who earned pensions and retiree health coverage that those benefits were guaranteed. But then LTV went bankrupt and ditched its obligations. Skvara told the candidates:

“Every day of my life, I sit at the kitchen table across from the woman who devoted 36 years of her life to my family and I can’t afford her health care. What’s wrong with America, and what will you do to change it?”

Skvara asked that question two years ago when 45 million Americans lacked health insurance. Now 46.3 million are without it.

And yet, teabaggers and Republicans are bent on preventing reform. They want to ensure only one thing – that another million Americans suffer no health coverage two years from now.

President Obama invoked Skvara’s name at the AFL-CIO convention in Pittsburgh on Sept. 15 in a speech about the middle class.

Mostly Skvara is a symbol of health insurance failure. But to Obama, he’s an emblem of something much bigger. It is a struggle of economic philosophies. For the past 20 years, the winning view has been that government should give breaks to big corporations and rich individuals. Obama told the AFL-CIO he believes in something different — an economy built on a vibrant and wide middle class.

Here’s what he said:

“For over half a century, the success of America has been built on the success of our middle class. It was the creation of the middle class that lifted this nation up in the wake of a great depression. It was the expansion of the middle class that opened the doors of opportunity to millions more. It was a strong middle class that powered American industries, propelled America’s economy, and made the 20^th Century the first American Century.

And the fundamental test of our time is whether we will heed this lesson; whether we will let America become a nation of the very rich and the very poor, of the haves and the have nots; or whether we will remain true to the promise of this country and build a future where the success of all of us is build on the success of each of us.”

Because of the extraordinary cost of health care in this country, insurance is a middle class issue. Health insurance can make or break a family – place it firmly in the middle class if an employer provides a good plan or bankrupt it if a family loses coverage during a serious illness.

Obama said as much to the AFL-CIO: “We’ll grow our middle class by finally providing quality, affordable health insurance in this country.”

Just this week, the Kaiser Family Foundation released a report showing premiums for family coverage rose 130 percent over the past decade. They now average $13,375, which is about the same as the entire annual take-home pay of a minimum wage worker.

Coverage is not affordable. The price of it is pushing families down the economic ladder. Look what it did to Skvara.  He had been a middle class steelworker and remained in the middle class after retirement. But he moved toward poverty after the LTV bankruptcy cost his wife her health insurance coverage. Loss of health insurance and the ensuing medical bills robs families of their life savings, their homes, everything until they’re bankrupt.

Skvara asked the candidates what was wrong with America and what would they do to fix it. Obama’s plan for fixing health insurance would forbid dropping or denying coverage because a person is sick or has a pre-existing condition.

He wants the public option to provide competition so that rates are affordable. That public option would cover Skvara’s wife – at a reasonable cost. So he could remain in the middle class and not find himself asking heartbreaking questions at public meetings.

The teabaggers are apoplectic because this isn’t just about health care. This is about the values of a government.

The Obama administration fails to fawn over the affluent.

Instead, Obama talked of downtrodden workers in the former Jones & Laughlin Steel mill in Aliquippa. Bosses there fired a dozen workers shortly after the National Labor Relations Act passed in 1935. The workers, mostly union organizers, challenged the dismissals all the way the U.S. Supreme Court, securing a landmark win that not only got them their jobs back, but also affirmed the constitutionality of the labor law that led to the burgeoning of union organizing, and the growth of America’s large, stable middle class.

To win that case, Obama told the AFL-CIO convention, workers of different ethnicities and faiths had to work together and stick together. That will be necessary to win this struggle to reform health insurance as well. But that reform is only the first part of Obama’s plan for the middle class:

“We will make possible the dreams of middle class families and make real the promise of the United States of America.”

That’s worth fighting for.