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Arlene Holt Baker

Arlene Holt Baker
AFL-CIO Executive Vice President

Forty-seven years ago this Aug. 28, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech.

The occasion was the massive March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

Americans need the spirit and the dream of Dr. King badly today, as millions suffer from the worst economy in 75 years. And while this Great Recession hits people of color, women and young people the hardest, the twin plagues of foreclosure and joblessness have hurt all of us.

This year on Aug. 28, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin will try to hijack the dream. Beck plans to hold a Restoring Honor rally at the Lincoln Memorial on the anniversary of Dr. King’s monumental speech. He claims the timing was coincidental and that the event will be non-political.

If I wasn’t so offended by all this, I would laugh up my sleeve. A rally headlined by Sarah Palin is not, repeat not, non-political. (more…)

I get a lot of anti-Obama stuff these days. My response is as follows, to all of them:

I am a progressive, not a Democrat, but CERTAINLY not a Republican. My biggest problem with Obama is that he tries to pander to the right too much. 

At the end of the day, on his worst day, Obama is exponentially better for this country than George Bush was. I’ll go even further – since 1980, this country has been headed down the wrong path at breakneck speed. Worker productivity has consistently gone up, while wages have gone down. Reagan’s trickle down economic policy, moderated only slightly by Bill Clinton, has crippled our economy. While it has been very good for the very rich (about the top 0.1%), it has been a nightmare for the middle class, which has been decimated to the point that there aren’t many of us left.

I just wish that all of these naysayers, many of whom are suffering from the avalanche started by Reagan, could see that we are in the mess we’re in because of the Republicans, albeit with the complicity of the Democrats. While Democrats are less hostile to the middle class, they are still beholden to the multi-national corporations to the extent that they can give little more than lip service to the problem that they at least admit exists. 

Having said the above, why is anybody surprised that Obama hasn’t turned the Titanic around? If anybody, Democrats included, thought that ANYBODY could turn around the disaster that has been foisted upon America for the last 30 years in less than a year, they were kidding themselves. 

I just shudder to think how bad it would be if Obama had not been elected. Worse, I tremble at the thought that the electorate might consider the likes of Sarah Palin to replace him!  

Steve Walls
Vardaman, Miss. and Nashville, Tenn.

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Robert Creamer

By Robert Creamer
Political organizer, strategist and author

The way the Republicans reacted to Congressman Joe Barton’s “apology” to BP at the hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Committee reminds you of what happens when a group of teenagers find out that a member of their “secret club” has revealed the secret handshake to the school principal.

Barton had the audacity to say out loud a secret that everyone else in the Republican fraternity knows very well — that the Republicans are a Party of, by and for Big Oil. From Cheney’s secret oil executive populated “Energy Taskforce” to “drill baby drill” — and for decades before – the oil industry has held the Republican puppet strings.

When the Republicans controlled Congress and Joe Barton chaired the Energy and Commerce Committee, the CEO of BP himself might has well have sat in the big chair at the head of the hearing room. As the Ranking Republican on Energy and Commerce, Barton would be likely to reprise his chairmanship of Energy and Commerce were the Republicans to retake control of the House. That would make the apologist-in-chief for BP the guy in the House who “oversees” the oil industry.

Since Barton came to Congress in 1984, he has received $1.4 million in campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry as a whole — $27,350 of it from people and political committees associated with BP. Barton has received $100,000 in contributions from the oil industry this cycle alone.

Far from being an outlier in the Republican caucus, Barton simply articulated the point of view that most of the caucus shares. Just a day before Barton labeled the $20 billion escrow fund — negotiated by President Obama to guarantee that money is available to cover the losses caused by their pollution of the Gulf — “a shakedown scheme,” the Republican Study Group, representing 112 Republican House Members said:

“BP’s reported willingness to go along with the White House’s new fund suggests that the Obama Administration is hard at work exerting its brand of Chicago-style shakedown politics.”

In their statement distancing themselves from Barton after his outburst, House Republican Leader John Boehner and his team referred to the spill as a “natural disaster.” Of course oil is a product of “nature,” but the fact that it exploded into the Gulf was caused by the drilling bit deployed by BP and its contractors — not by some “act of God.”

Since Obama was elected, the Republicans, with very few exceptions, have been steadfast against passage of a clean energy bill that would begin to wean America from its addiction to oil. They have stood firmly behind the oil industry’s desire to force the world to depend on its increasingly scarce and expensive fossil fuels.

Then there is Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski who recently fought tooth and nail in a failed attempt to get the Senate to prevent the EPA from enforcing pollution standards against green house gases. Had it passed it would have represented another bonanza for the oil industry. She was joined by all of her Republican Senate colleagues.

And Republican fealty to the oil barons goes back decades.

John Weaver, a former strategist for John McCain, is quoted in the Friday’s Washington Post as saying that the oil industry “has deep pockets, and they have a long history of supporting Republicans…. Like any kind of addiction, it’s a terribly difficult thing to break.”

Well, like most addicts, the Republicans would much rather indulge their compulsion in private. Barton’s blurted apology at Thursday’s hearing shined the light on the Republican’s oil habit. It was as if someone suddenly turned on the lights in the back room of a darkened “crack house.” There were all those Republicans rubbing their eyes and trying to get a steady footing. That includes the Republican “oil queen” herself –Sarah Palin — who blurted out on Twitter – with almost drug-induced incoherence:

“Extreme Greenies: see now why we push ‘drill, baby, drill’ of known reserves & promising finds in safe onshore places like ANWR (the Alaskan Natural Wildlife Refuge”)? Now do you get it?”

Of course — that’s it — the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon had nothing to do with the fact that our dependence on oil drives companies to drill in ever more remote and difficult places – at ever greater cost and risk. It has nothing to do with the fact that BP would rather cut corners to make even more money than to prepare for the consequences of their recklessness. It has nothing to do with the lack of regulation engineered by Republicans who think that big corporations can do no wrong. The Deepwater Horizon exploded because we aren’t drilling for oil in ANWR. Right, Sarah.

If Sarah Palin believes that, then she must be addicted to something more mind-altering than oil money.

***

This piece was first published on The Huffington Post

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Robert Creamer is a long-time political organizer and strategist, and author of the recent book: Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, available on Amazon.com.

Bill Lucy

By Bill Lucy
President, Coalition of Black Trade Unionists 

Don’t pity Rand Paul, who pleads he’s not the civil rights bogeyman that his own words have exposed him to be. Paul, the new prince of the Tea Party movement and the Republican Senate candidate in Kentucky, got in hot water last week when he said private businesses shouldn’t be forced to adhere to civil right rights laws. 

Even though Paul quickly backpedaled from his bigoted remark, I just don’t buy it. Based on Dr. Paul’s previous writings on civil rights, his comment was not a benign slip of the tongue. 

For me, Rand Paul epitomizes what I would call the “rise (or return) of the Rollback Movement:” the Tea Party zealots who want to ‘take back their government;’ Arizona’s far-right Legislature that passed a hateful immigration law that blatantly discriminates against people with brown skin; the Texas State Board of Education that now requires students to study Confederate President Jefferson Davis’ inaugural address [to secede from the United the States of America!] and to study the “contributions of Confederate generals.” 

What binds these groups together is a passion and determination to rollback history and shift the burden of their economic and cultural insecurity onto people of color striving for a more tolerant, inclusive and equitable America. 

This Rollback Movement recites the coded buzzwords spewed by conservative pied-pipers like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin. All the while, mainstream media rush to turn xenophobic noisemakers like the Tea Party into political celebrities. As a result, new dimensions of the economic crisis go unreported or get marginalized. 

For example, last Friday (May 21), The Washington Post gave Rand Paul’s controversial remarks front-page coverage. Yet, the same day, the Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper totally ignored the release of a stunning new report that reveals the wealth gap between blacks and whites has more than quadrupled over the course of a generation from $20,000 to $95,000. But the study by the Institute on Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis University did catch the attention of James Parks on the AFL-CIO’s blog. According to the study: 

African American families have fewer economic resources to fall back on during this economic crisis than do white families, mainly due to discrimination and tax policies that favor the rich.

In fact, a typical white family is now five times richer than its African-American counterpart of the same class.

That means blacks had little or no money to start businesses, send children to college or ensure a secure retirement, the authors say.

Black households have also been dealt another wealth-building blow in the shrinking part of the workforce that is unionized: 

In 2009, black union membership plummeted by more than 200,000, constituting 27 percent of the total union jobs lost and more than double the share of black workers in unions (13 percent.)

This disproportionate erosion of black union jobs means African-American workers – already saddled with a steep wealth deficit – will lose health care coverage for their families, pension income for their retirement and a nest egg to help their children achieve some level of financial security. 

That’s why with the economy barely creeping back to life, it’s imperative that workers of color have equal access to jobs that compensate them fully and fairly. Otherwise, the racial income and wealth gaps will only deepen and multiple over generations. 

Congress can help shape the inclusive economy we must build to ensure shared prosperity across lines of class, color and gender. A crucial step in that direction would be passage of the Employee Free Choice Act, which would empower workers to join unions and demand fair pay without intimidation or retaliation. 

I’m hopeful President Obama will champion this vital bill as he fine-tunes his strategy to tackle the jobs crisis. Then let the Rollback Movement confront an energized and multi-hued progressive movement. 

***
In 1972, William Lucy founded the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists (CBTU), an organization of union leaders and rank-and-file members dedicated to the needs of black and minority group workers. Lucy, who served as International Secretary-Treasurer of the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) for nearly 40 years, also co-founded the Free South Africa Movement. This grassroots campaign sparked widespread opposition to apartheid in the U.S. When South Africa conducted its first post-apartheid elections, Lucy served as a monitor with the AFL-CIO delegation. In November of 1994, he became the first African American to be elected president of Public Services International (PSI), the world’s largest union federation. A year later, the AFL-CIO appointed him to its executive council. In addition Lucy served on the boards of directors of civic groups such as the African America Institute, Americans for Democratic Action, and the Center for Policy Alternatives.

Leo W. Gerard

By Leo W. Gerard
USW International President

Tea Party darling and Republican U.S. Senate nominee Rand Paul spoke last week like the political novice he is – revealing unfiltered GOP “truths.”

First he informed MSNBC talk show host Rachel Maddow that government should not be able to force businesses to serve black people. Corporate desire to discriminate should trump the civil rights of black people, Muslims, Jews, Catholics, and pants-wearing women, according to this Republican candidate, who has since rushed to assure everyone that he personally is not a bigot.

Rand Paul followed up the assertion of corporate-privilege-over-human-rights with two more Republican tenet revelations. First he called the Obama administration “un-American” for holding the corporation BP accountable for the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig that killed 11 workers and devastated the ecology of the Gulf of Mexico. Then Rand Paul added that society should refrain from the “blame game” in the case of another corporation, Massey Energy, the owner of the West Virginia mine that blew up killing 29 workers. “We had a mining accident that was very tragic,” he said, “Then we come in, and it’s always someone’s fault. Maybe sometimes accidents happen.”

The Republican candidate who openly espoused these views was embraced last Saturday by U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell at a rally in Frankfort, Ky. And during the primary, former GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and Republican senators Jim DeMint of South Carolina and Jim Bunning of Kentucky actively supported Rand Paul. He simply said what Republicans believe – that this country should focus on promoting corporations and those corporations should have privileges, but not responsibilities. To the GOP, the U.S.A. should be a country of corporations, by corporations, for corporations.

People, by contrast, are trifling to the GOP. In the past couple of weeks, the GOP has made its position on humans clear by trying to end an emergency fund that will create 186,000 subsidized jobs this year for poor people and by blocking an extension of unemployment insurance for those thrown out of work during the worst recession since the Great Depression, a downturn caused by reckless Wall Street corporations. Following the lead of Bunning, who delayed an extension in February, Republican Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire said the unemployed shouldn’t receive the insurance because it “encourages people to, rather than go out and look for work, to stay on unemployment.”

While attempting to deny relief to the desperate, Republicans have also blocked efforts to force oil corporations to assume full liability for catastrophic spills – like the BP disaster in the Gulf. If the oil corporations – which vehemently oppose an increase in their liability — don’t pay for environmental clean up, then taxpayers – including the unemployed – will get the bill. Still, House Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio opposed raising the laughably-low liability cap of $75 million, and Republicans James Inhofe of Oklahoma and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska have blocked efforts to lift the cap in the Senate.

Like Rand Paul, Boehner didn’t want to assign culpability to BP. Boehner said, “I think it’s important that we get to the bottom, get to the facts, before we begin to point fingers.”

Murkowski and Inhofe have a financial interest in kissing up to Big Oil. Those corporations have handed them buckets of bucks. According to the nonpartisan OpenSecrets.org, the oil and gas lobby has given Inhofe $433,950 over the past five years.  That lobby gave Markowski $240,326 in just the past year. That is 15 times what she got from oil and gas just two years ago, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. A Murkowski spokesman said the senator’s connection to oil and gas corporations is “the same relationship she has to all constituents.”

So, to Republican Murkowski, oil and gas corporations are constituents, exactly like the actual humans who live in her district. That characterization of corporations is consistent with the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision, written by its Republican-selected, right-wing majority, giving corporations the same rights as humans under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, a ruling that will enable corporations to spend virtually unlimited money to influence elections.

Usually such rights come with responsibilities. But Republicans, by impeding an increase in the liability cap, have made clear their opposition to oil and gas corporations bearing the responsibility of paying all costs when their errors kill workers and destroy the environment. Not only that, under the guise of government downsizing, they have thwarted enforcement of regulations intended to prevent deaths and catastrophes. The Bush administration, for example, cut funds for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).

Also during the Bush administration, according to a Department of Interior inspector general report released this week, federal regulators responsible for oversight of drilling in the Gulf of Mexico allowed corporate officials to fill out inspection reports in pencil, then traced over those marks in pen and submitted them. That “self-regulation” is consistent with the Republican contention that the “invisible hand” of the market will adequately smack down bad corporate behavior.

Rand Paul reiterated the Republican policy on government during his rally with McConnell last Saturday. He said, “What unifies Republicans is a belief that the Constitution restrains the size and scope of government.” Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who Republicans chose to respond in February, 2009 to President Obama’s first address to a joint session of Congress, told that national TV audience he opposed “big government,” like all good Republicans do.

Also in that speech, Jindal joined the Republican chorus of “Drill Baby Drill,” calling for increased domestic oil and gas drilling. Now he’s got the ugly results of drilling-gone-wrong coating his coast. 

Since the spill, Jindal has petitioned the federal government – yes, the very government Republicans want to shrivel – to solve his state’s problems. He asked Obama to pay for 6,000 National Guardsmen for 90 days to help clean up. He wants the U.S. Department of Commerce to provide financial help to fishermen, the Environmental Protection Agency to test air quality, and the U.S. Business Administration to suspend loan repayments for small businesses affected by the gushing oil.

The Republican policy, apparently, is “Drill Baby Drill;” taxpayers can always clean the “accidental” spill. In the Republican world, corporations have the right to do anything they want, but no responsibility to do it right or restore what they wreck. Republicans hold the unemployed accountable – but not corporations.

Leo W. Gerard

 By Leo W. Gerard
USW International President

When President Barack Obama signed the historic health insurance reform bill, he said it was, “Change we can believe in.” He noted that his party has sought reform for more than half a century. The effort began long before President Harry Truman recommended to Congress on Nov. 19, 1945 a comprehensive health program, noting: “People with low or moderate incomes do not get the same medical attention as those with high incomes. The poor have more sickness, but they get less medical care.”

The legislation Obama signed will tax the wealthy – those earning more than a quarter million dollars a year – to help pay for extending insurance to millions of poor and working people and for guaranteeing insurance companies can’t deny access to those with pre-existing conditions or withdraw coverage from those who get sick.

Republicans have vowed to overturn or repeal this law that would aid tens of millions of Americans. House Republican leader John Boehner yelled, “hell no” repeatedly to the reform proposals and described them as “Armageddon.”

Every historic moment in this country – from the Revolution and the Civil War to the enactment of Social Security and Civil Rights legislation – compelled Americans to assess their values and choose sides. In the case of Civil Rights legislation, for example, some, including the late Republican senator from South Carolina, Strom Thurmond, stood with the Klu Klux Klan and other hate-mongers seeking to deny civil rights to black people. By contrast, others favored peaceful enactment and enforcement of what they perceived to be fair civil rights laws enabling black adults to vote and black children to receive the same quality education as white youngsters.

This is such a moment. Americans must decide what is just and decent in the richest Democracy in the world. They must choose whether to side with the rich and the hate mongers or to align themselves with working people and hope.

“The bill I’m signing will set in motion reforms that generations of Americans have fought for and marched for and hungered to see,” Obama said during the ceremony in the East Room of the White House. That makes it a landmark bill, but it’s also historic because this measure is the first government attempt in thirty years to halt rising income inequality, the New York Times reported a day after the signing.

The wealthy – those earning more than $250,000 a year – will pay for part of the reforms with tax increases. For example, those in the $1 million salary, perks and bonuses club will pay an additional $46,000 a year in 2013, according to the Tax Policy Center, a Washington research group. This million dollar club is the very group that has benefited most over the past eight years from the Bush tax cuts for the rich.  

The richest one percent in this club now take in 23.5 percent of all income in this country – the largest percent since 1928, the year before the Great Stock Market Crash and the onset of the Great Depression. Then it was 23.9 percent.  Income inequality has risen since the 1970s, when the fortunes of the nation’s rich began skyrocketing while middle class wages stagnated. Simultaneously, the rich got tax rate breaks much larger than those given the middle class and poor.

Beyond taxing the rich, the bill contributes to reducing income inequality in another way. New York Times reporter David Leonhardt described it:

“In the broadest sense, insurance is meant to spread the costs of an individual’s misfortune — illness, death, fire, flood — across society. Since the late 1970s, though, the share of Americans with health insurance has shrunk. As a result, the gap between the economic well-being of the sick and the healthy has been growing, at virtually every level of the income distribution.”

During his presidential campaign, Obama promised to reform health insurance, and signing this bill fulfilled that pledge. Here’s how: It ensures that children with pre-existing conditions get insurance, that adults with pre-existing conditions have access to insurance from a temporary high-risk pool, that senior citizens get help paying for prescriptions during the “donut hole” in their Medicare drug coverage, that every insured person gets free preventive care, that children up to age 26 can stay on their parents’ insurance plans, that no lifetime limit on benefits may be imposed by insurance companies.

It provides for approximately 24 million people who don’t have access to affordable coverage through their employers to get tax credits to buy insurance from new state-based exchanges. It enables everyone who earns less that 133 percent of the poverty level – approximately 16 million people – to get Medicaid. It gives small businesses tax credits of up to 35 percent of premiums to help make coverage affordable for their workers.

And, a benefit for everyone — even the rich — is that the bill will lower the national deficit by $100 billion in the next decade, a determination made by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office.

Republicans are intent on preventing Americans from receiving these benefits. Republicans in Congress contend they’ll try to repeal the law. A dozen Republican state attorneys general filed suit seeking to overturn it.

Those opposing health insurance reform don’t mention the benefits. Instead, they call names, engage in vandalism and incite violence. Sarah Palin posted a map on her sarahpac website marked with 20 gun sight crosshairs on the congressional districts of Democrats who voted for health insurance reform. The Republican National Committee posted on its website a photo of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi surrounded by flames and urging her firing.

The FBI is investigating death threats made since the vote against Democrats and their families. A brick was thrown through the office window of a New York congresswoman who supported reform and bricks shattered glass doors at a New York Democratic committee office. An Arizona Democrat’s office was vandalized after the vote. Opponents of the bill spit on one Democratic congressman and shouted racial and homophobic slurs at others before the vote and afterward faxed to a black Congressman the image of a noose. Conservative commentators including Glenn Beck compared the reform measure to the devastation on 9/11.

Former Republican presidential candidate John McCain said that because the measure passed, “there will be no cooperation for the rest of the year” from the GOP. Republicans made good on that threat, using an obscure Senate rule to prevent hearings past 2 p.m., forcing cancellations.

Republicans in the Senate have announced they will do everything in their power to prevent passage of a package of amendments adopted by the House to improve the Health Insurance Bill. These amendments include elimination of perks given several states, including the so-called Corkhusker Kickback and the Gator-Aid, both of which Republicans have attacked for weeks. Still, Republicans say they’ll attempt to retain those deals in the final bill by blocking the amendments. Similarly, the package of amendments provides a method to close the donut hole in the Medicare prescription program, providing financial relief to millions of senior citizens. The Republican’s plan to prevent passage of the amendments would force senior citizens to pay nearly $4,000 extra each year for prescriptions.

With their anger and vitriol, Republicans and Tea Partiers are banking on Americans rejecting health insurance reform. But their plan is in peril. Americans appear to be embracing hope and change in health care.

Before the vote, polls showed a majority opposed the bill. Many argued that could be explained by the fact that a significant number of those counted as opponents simply wanted stronger reform, such as a public option. Poll results are different now. A Gallup Poll taken after the House vote found 50 percent enthusiastic or pleased, while only 42 percent were angry or disappointed. Similarly, in that poll, 49% thought the reform measure to be good for the country while 40% thought it was bad.

Hate and obstructionism are ugly. Americans prefer to see themselves and their country as hopeful, constructive and goodhearted.

Mike Elk

By Mike Elk
Of Campaign for America’s Future

Conservatives have started a disturbing pattern of attacking Democrats for the consequences of weak Buy America provisions in last year’s Recovery Act, even though they opposed the tougher Buy America provisions that would have averted the problems in the first place.

Last week, I wrote about how Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele launched this Republican talking point:

… Steele blasted the Obama administration in a fund-raising email earlier this week for allowing stimulus money designated for clean energy solutions to be spent on overseas companies. Which is interesting, because stimulus money going to overseas firms was the direct result of conservative opposition to attempts to keep that money in America.

Now it seems that Sarah Palin has joined the chorus of flip-flopping conservatives opposed to Buy America, who ignore the fact that progressive Democrats were fighting for Buy America language in the stimulus. Palin wrote on her Facebook wall:

“We were promised it would provide “green jobs” for Americans, but 80% of the $2 billion they spent on alternative energy went to purchase wind turbines built in China!”

While some of the money did go to foreign companies to spend on windmill components built overseas, a lot of that money went to the U.S.-based subsidiaries of foreign companies. Russ Choma, author of the study which Palin cites, rebuts Palin in this Politifact article:

The Investigative Reporting Workshop’s story on stimulus dollars and the wind industry came in two parts. In October 2009, it published its first analysis. The group found that of the $1.05 billion in clean-energy grants already handed out by the Department of Energy, about 84 percent — or $849 million — ended up in the hands of foreign wind companies. We spoke with Russ Choma, the story’s author, who explained that these grants are given to U.S.-based wind projects, but that many of these projects are being built by the American subsidiaries of foreign-owned companies. For instance, on Sept. 22, 2009, the DOE awarded $464.2 million to wind projects, and all of it went to local subsidiaries of foreign companies, according to the report. Those companies include Iberdrola, a Spanish company that received $250.9 million; the American subsidiary of Japan’s Eurus Energy, which got $91.3 million; and the American subsidiary of Germany’s E.ON Group, which received $121.9 million. Choma also points out that the wind turbine manufacturing industry in the United States is relatively weak compared to those abroad; of the 1,807 turbines erected in the United States as a result of the stimulus grants, foreign-owned manufacturers made 1,219, according to the report.

Besides Palin misrepresenting the facts, Palin fails to note that her fellow conservative Republicans opposed Buy America language, labeling it“bad for America.”

As I noted last week:

Republican presidential candidate John McCain went on CBS’s Face the Nation on February 8, 2009:

“I think it has policy changes in it which are fundamentally bad for America. For example, their ‘Buy America’ provision: that’s protectionism, and that did not work in any time in our history.”

As recently as October 2009, GOP Congressional leaders held an event to call for the rollback of Buy America provisions claiming that Buy America provisions were “costing American jobs.”

This is just another example of Republicans obfuscating their positions in order to win votes. But what’s disturbing is that there is a margin of truth in what they say. Because Buy America provisions were weak in the stimulus bill, some of the money (though not as much as Palin claims) did go overseas. It happened because Democrats failed to put up a strong enough fight.

That can’t happen again. As Congress considers a jobs bill, it’s important that we encourage members not to compromise on Buy America provisions. If Democrats allow Buy America to be weakened, conservatives will use the result to attack them anyway. They should instead force Republicans into a real, round-the-clock filibuster Buy America language. That will show just how patriotic conservatives are when its comes to using American taxpayer money to give Americans jobs.

Dean Baker

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

As a basic rule, politicians will say anything they can get away with. If an effective politician thinks that he can call his opponent a drug-dealing, serial-murdering gangster, and have the charge taken seriously by the media, then he will do it, even if there is no reality whatsoever to the allegation. The reason that most politicians don’t describe their opponents this way is because the media will denounce them as liars, who are unfit for responsible public office.

This basic truth must be kept in mind in understanding the health care debate. The debate has trailed off into loon tune land, and it’s the media’s fault.

The lunacy was most clearly in evidence in former Gov. Sarah Palin’s claim that President Obama’s plan would force her to stand in front of a “death panel” to argue for the life of her baby with Down Syndrome. This “death panel” is a complete invention by Governor Palin. There is no twist or turn or contorted permutation of President Obama’s plan that would prevent Ms. Palin from providing as much health care as she wants to her baby.

It would have made as much sense to claim that the transportation bill will deny medical care to her baby. After all, if the roads in front of her home are not properly maintained, and her baby has a medical emergency, then the transportation bill would have effectively sentenced her baby to death because she won’t be able to get medical attention in a timely manner.

The reason that Governor Palin thought she could make up stories about President Obama’s death panels is that the media have treated all sorts of other absurd inventions about his health care plan with respect. At the most basic level, opponents have repeatedly said that President Obama’s plan will lead to rationing of health care.

Of course, there is absolutely nothing in President Obama’s plan that resembles rationing. He certainly intends to limit the type of medical procedures that the government would fund, but opponents of the plan don’t want the government to fund any procedures. So, how is restricting the procedures funded through a government plan rationing? Anyone who wants to is entirely free to buy as much health care as they want outside of the government-subsidized plan. Where is the rationing?

Using Governor Palin’s story, there may be mothers who are less wealthy than her who will be able to care for a baby with Down Syndrome or other serious affliction as a result of President Obama’s plan. These mothers might not otherwise have this option because they could not afford the health care. It is easy to see how President Obama’s plan can lead to life compared with the current situation. It’s virtually impossible to see how it leads to death.

The media have allowed the politicians to turn life into death and night into day when it comes to the health care debate because they decided that anything said against President Obama’s plan should be treated with respect, no matter how absurd it might be.

The line about rationing isn’t the only place where the media have fallen down on the job in the health care debate. Instead of telling us that the cost of the plan was “huge,” as the have often done, the media could have put the cost in a context that would make it understandable to people who are not policy wonks. They could have told us that the projected $1 trillion cost over the next decade is equal to about 0.5 percent of GDP, less than half of the cost of Iraq-Afghanistan wars at their peak.

The $250 billion ten-year shortfall that Congress is struggling to fill is a bit more than 0.1 percent of GDP, rounding error in the total budget. But the media only assured the public that this gap was a big hole in the budget; they didn’t try to tell us how big.

The media have the job of informing the public. They have the time and the resources to know that when opponents of President Obama’s plan talk about rationing, they are not telling the truth (i.e. they are lying). If the media just pass these assertions on to the public without comment, then they are giving them credibility.

And if the opponents of health reform think they can get away with one really big lie, then why shouldn’t they start moving forward with even bigger ones. It was only a matter of time before someone came up with Governor Palin’s death panel line. For this we owe our thanks to The Washington Post and the rest of the mainstream media.

***

Dean Baker is the author of the new book, “Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy.”

This piece was first published on Huffington Post.

By Leo W. Gerard
International President

Protestors disrupted a convention of mortgage financers in San Francisco this week, storming the stage as former Bush advisor Karl Rove spoke, heckling bankers with bullhorns, and badgering a panel with demands for a foreclosure moratorium.

Fear and frustration compelled ordinary citizens to harangue the green-visor set at their normally-staid annual meeting. Middle class Americans are losing their jobs and their homes and their hope while watching Ben Bernanke and Hank Paulson spend their tax dollars to bail out the infinitely-wealthy on Wall Street whose reprehensible risk-taking caused the country’s financial crisis. The middle class want their piece of the American pie.

Congress is trying to dish it out in the form of a second stimulus package that would extend unemployment insurance and food stamps and create jobs through programs such as highway construction projects.

Republican candidates John McCain and Sarah Palin oppose it. They’re running around the country with caricatures of Joe the Plumber and Joe Sixpack, pretending the GOP ticket represents the best interests of the working class and small business owners. It’s all false rhetoric and no real action. McCain and Palin object to intervention for anyone other than the wealthy, for whom they plan to enshrine tax cuts; for overfed CEOs, for whom they believe the $700 billion bailout was justified, and for themselves, for whom they believe the Republican National Committee appropriately opened its purse to purchase haute couture wardrobes, hair stylists and makeup artists.

McCain wants to brand a socialist S on Barack Obama although both voted for the bailout plan under which the U.S. government is nationalizing banks.

Unlike McCain, however, Obama is a man of the people and believes not in socialism but in the religious concept of everyone serving as their brothers’ keepers.  This is how he explained it in his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention:

“What — what is that American promise? It’s a promise that says each of us has the freedom to make of our own lives what we will, but that we also have obligations to treat each other with dignity and respect.
It’s a promise that says the market should reward drive and innovation and generate growth, but that businesses should live up to their responsibilities to create American jobs, to look out for American workers, and play by the rules of the road.
Ours — ours is a promise that says government cannot solve all our problems, but what it should do is that which we cannot do for ourselves: protect us from harm and provide every child a decent education; keep our water clean and our toys safe; invest in new schools, and new roads, and science, and technology.
Our government should work for us, not against us. It should help us, not hurt us. It should ensure opportunity not just for those with the most money and influence, but for every American who’s willing to work.
That’s the promise of America, the idea that we are responsible for ourselves, but that we also rise or fall as one nation, the fundamental belief that I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper.
That’s the promise we need to keep. That’s the change we need right now.”

That philosophy has great appeal with unemployment at a five-year high of 6.1 percent, with the poverty rate rising to 12.5 percent in what is supposed to be the richest country in the world; with 47 million without health insurance; with 1 million homes lost to foreclosure in the past two years and another 1.5 million in the process, and with the chronically ill across American skipping medications because they can’t afford them, as the NYT reported this week.

Because this philosophy is popular, Palin and McCain are trying to channel it, to steal it just as they did the “change” slogan, to try to make Americans believe that they would best serve the middle class. The problem is that everything they do belies their claims.

Sarah “Sixpack” Palin definitely has an elitist eye for clothing, hair styling and makeup. She spent $150,000 of Republican National Committee money on designer duds for herself and her family since accepting the nomination on Sept. 3. That’s three times the annual income for a typical American family. If she doesn’t shell out another dime, she’ll have spent $2,400 a day on clothing between the convention and the election. The vice presidential candidate’s taste includes a $2,500 Valentino Garavani jacket from Saks Fifth Avenue that she wore to the convention.

In addition, she and McCain decided their most important advisor, the one they would reward with the highest salary in the first two weeks of October as the stock market crashed, was Sarah Palin’s makeup artist. Her earnings for proper Palin powdering were $22,800 for two weeks, nearly twice the salary McCain and Palin gave their second highest paid staffer – their chief foreign policy advisor. They paid him $12,500, just $2,500 more than the $10,000 they ponied up for Palin’s hair stylist, whose compensation was fourth highest. The total for Palin’s hair and makeup in two weeks: $32,800.

While you’re scrimping and saving and shopping at Costco to prevent foreclosure of your home, just remember what Palin told CNN reporter Drew Griffin about providing a stimulus package to help the middle class: “But now that we’re hearing that the Democrats want an additional stimulus package or bailout package for what, hundreds of billions of dollars more, this is not a time to use the economic crisis as an excuse for reckless spending and for greater, bigger government and to move the private sector to the back burner and let government be assumed to be the be all, end all solution to the economic challenges that we have.”

So, for Palin, great big government is okay to bail out Wall Street fat cats, but not to help the middle class. Palin’s knee-jerk Republican “let-the-private-sector-solve-it” attitude shocks the consciousness after the indiscretion of the private sector just landed this country in financial crisis. We’re not inclined to trust them, frankly, Ms. Palin.

McCain said the same, backing the bailout for the reckless on Wall Street, and damning attempts by Democrats to help those on Main Street – of course, all the while dragging up the image of Joe the Plumber and contending he’s the guy’s advocate.

The ticket clearly lacks both introspection and economic expertise. McCain said it himself last year – that he was no authority on the economy.  By contrast, a person with some degree of economic proficiency, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, this week endorsed additional fiscal stimulus, saying it was appropriate now because the economy is likely to be weak for several quarters. In addition, economic expert and Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman said this week that additional government spending now – for a stimulus package – is appropriate, particularly for infrastructure improvement, which would provide real value and create jobs.

Though McCain and Palin clearly don’t understand, it’s time for everyday Americans to share in the American pie. At a rally in Florida this week, Obama talked about how the policies of the Bush administration have shrunk the pie and permitted the wealthy to grab the few remaining crumbs. He told he crowd he has no desire to reapportion the pie, as McCain keeps accusing him wanting to do – as a socialist, you know. Also, Obama objects to the McCain-Palin policy of continuing to feed the rich all of the crumbs, which is particularly evident in the GOP tax plan.

Obama told the group his goal is to expand the pie to ensure that all Americans get a piece. The crowd responded with a spontaneous chant of, “We want pie!”

That’s what is going on in America. That’s why protestors accosted mortgage bankers at their California convention. The middle class won’t stand for the rich wolfing down all of the pie anymore.