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In the first three years of the Clinton White House, there were two memorable budget wars, in 1993 and 1995. The open fights with the Republicans were brutal, highest-of-high stakes white-knuckle showdowns where Clinton’s entire presidency was on the line. Behind the scenes, though, our internal fights inside the White House were almost as intense. One thing I will never forget was a meeting where my old friend Bob Boorstin, one of the earliest staffers to join Clinton’s campaign, was fighting to keep some important line items that would help the poor in place and bluntly told President Clinton, “Your budget represents your values.”

While those of us fighting for more spending to help low and middle income people lost a few rounds in these internal debates, we won more than we lost, and in both 1993 and 1995 the budgets Clinton presented and the ones he ended up negotiating with Congress were quite progressive. The 1993 budget raised taxes on the wealthy, lowered taxes on the poor through a big expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit, and increased investment in programs like education, the environment, Head Start, and Student Grants and Loans. In the 1995 budget showdown with the Republicans in Congress, Clinton rejected the advice of people like Mark Penn that he avoid a showdown, and decided to draw a line in the sand to save “Medicare, Medicaid, Education, and the Environment” from cuts that Gingrich wanted to impose, and he decisively won that battle. In all of the budgets that Clinton proposed and negotiated with Congress while president, he for the most part embraced Democratic values.

20 years after Clinton’s first epic budget battle, our current Democratic president is wrestling with what budget to propose to Congress. The House and the Senate have already proposed radically different ideas of what a budget should look like, so obviously what Obama proposes is just one part of a much longer budget debate, but symbolically, as a presentation of his values, it remains a very important moment. The president has been spending the last year and a half talking about how he wants to fight for the middle class, and his budget should reflect those values. This is why it is so deeply troubling, as the Wall Street Journal and other news outlets are now reporting, that Obama is strongly considering putting a Social Security cut into his budget document. By doing this, the president can no longer fall back on what he has been telling progressives and Democrats in Congress, that he doesn’t want to cut Social Security but is willing to trade it for some good things that the Republicans would give up in a budget deal. By embracing — embracing! — Social Security cuts as part of his budget, his statement of values, the president is telling the American public, senior citizens, and progressives that he wants to cut what they overwhelmingly and passionately support.

I don’t agree with Nancy Pelosi’s policy or political premise when she says about chained CPI:

I have to say if we can demonstrate that it doesn’t hurt the poor and the very elderly, then let’s take a look at it because compared to what? Compared to what? Compared to Republicans saying Medicare should wither on the vine? Social Security has no place in a free society? (more…)

Tom Ward was 13 when his father came home from what would be his last day of work. Ward’s father “barely made it through the door, fell to the floor and, between tears, said, ‘I can’t do it anymore.’”

Later that year, at age 39, Ward’s father suffocated to death–the effect of silicosis. His work as a sandblaster had exposed him to cancer-causing silica dust.

Every year, silica dust takes hundreds of American lives and makes thousands more, mostly construction workers, sick. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Two years ago tomorrow, Feb. 14, the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) submitted a draft proposed rule to reduce exposure to life-threatening silica dust to the White House’s Office of Management and Budget. The review was supposed to take 90 days–but two years later, the draft rule is still there, languishing in regulatory limbo while workers continue to be exposed to the deadly dust.

For decades, working people and their unions have fought to make jobs safer. And we’ve made great progress, winning job safety standards that have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. But at every step toward progress, we faced the same obstacles that are blocking stronger silica dust limits: well-funded knee-jerk opposition by business trade groups and industry associations. (more…)

Since being thumped hard by voters last November, Republican leaders have gone through a period of reflection, introspection, and contemplation – and they now say they must make fundamental internal changes to become realistic political contenders.

Does this mean they’re finally going to quit being a political front for the Koch brothers’ plutocratic fantasies, jettison their tea party nuttiness about everything from nullification to “legitimate rape,” or stop their destructive fixation on budget slashing? No, no – it’s not their own, deeply-flawed fundamentals they intend to change, but the inner workings of America’s election mechanics. The problem, they say, is not their unpopular policies or their offensive strategy of attacking whole swaths of the electorate – but that states are not allocating their electoral votes in ways that would throw the election to Republicans. (more…)

News reports from a variety of places, and my own personal report-backs from participants at last week’s progressive organization leaders meeting at the White House, indicate that the president is signaling loudly that he will stand strong on at least some of the very highest priority things that progressives care the most about in the fiscal showdown talks. He continues to demand that the Bush tax cuts for those making over $250,000 go up. He said yesterday in the progressives meeting that Social Security was “off the table”, and he said that while he believes there can be Medicare and Medicaid savings from a variety of administrative methods, that he had no intention of cutting benefits. We don’t know how all of this is going to end up, but right now at least, the president has decided that in unity there is strength.

This doesn’t come as a big surprise to me. In a conversation a couple of months back with a senior White House official, we were talking about the fiscal showdown politics, and I was emphasizing that there would be a serious civil war in the Democratic party if Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid were cut — that our side wasn’t going to back down on this fight. His response was that the Obama team had learned from the past that the administration was in a far stronger position if they were unified with progressives, that they felt that was when they had gotten things done and had been in stronger political shape than when they had tried to triangulate things.

Now before you get too excited about that statement or take it as gospel, keep in mind something I learned early when I worked in the Clinton White House: there is no one White House political strategy or philosophy about how to do things. There are a lot of different players in a White House, and almost always several different views on how to get things done or play things out. I’m sure there are still people in that building who think it is smart politics to pick fights with the base, or who wish the “professional left” would just go away. But I do believe that there is a clear trend in the White House toward thinking it is better for Democrats to be unified in policy fights with the Republicans, simply because they keep getting rewarded politically when they are. (more…)

Is a little-known bureaucrat named Edward DeMarco an unreasonable, ideological obstructionist who’s blocking badly-needed homeowner relief? The White House says he is. So does Paul Krugman. Some of us having been harping on the subject for months.

Now the Administration says its hands are tied on a critical economic issue unless this lone bureaucrat has a change of heart. But there’s plenty the White House can do without the man whose obscure agency’s alphabet-soup name begins with the letter “F.”

Item #1 on the list begins with an “F,” too: Fire Edward DeMarco. But whether he stays or goes, there are a number of steps the Administration should be taking right now.

The issue at hand – reducing the amount owed on mortgages – can sound arcane, obscure, even wonkish. Words like “principal reduction,” and “second mortgage” don’t stir the soul as much as, say, “Give me liberty or give me death.” But for millions of Americans, principal reduction is an issue of liberty, and sometimes even of life and death.

A Big “F”-in’ Deal

A recent study showed that more homes are underwater than originally believed. Roughly 16 million borrowers owe the banks $1.2 trillion (with a “t”) for real estate value value that no longer exists. We did some projections from that date to come up with the full scope of the problem and found that more than 40 million people live in those homes, with total mortgages outstanding of roughly $4.8 trillion.

Major principal reduction would reduce the monthly burden for millions of families. It would free up tens of billions of dollars – or hundreds of billions – reducing monthly payments substantially. Struggling households would then spend most of that money for things other than the unjust enrichment of wealthy bankers – consumer goods and services, mostly.

A broad principal relief plan would be the equivalent of a massive stimulus program, one that could create millions of jobs and help jump-start economic growth. And it would do it without costing the Federal government a cent. (more…)

The thrilling announcement from the Obama administration that they are going to stop targeting DREAM Act-eligible young people for deportation is a reminder of what progress requires in America: first, a movement that never stops fighting for justice; and second, a President with progressives in his base who is open to change. Presidents rarely change important things unless an effective movement presses them to do it, and movements with a conservative President in office rarely win anything that matters because the conservative base wouldn’t let it happen.

This change in deportation policy happened because immigrants’ rights groups wouldn’t back down, kept banging away, and had the courage to confront a President who at times got very irritable under the pressure. It didn’t happen when Bush was in office even though Bush and Rove wanted desperately to resolve the immigration issue to give Republicans an opening to the fastest growing demographic group in the country, because the conservative base wouldn’t stand for it; and if Romney is elected, he will backtrack on this policy because of that same anti-immigrant base. But even an irritable, reluctant President with a center-left coalition and a movement that won’t shut up ended up moving forward with this policy.

Don’t hold Obama’s reluctance against Obama, though — it is woven into the very essence of American history that Presidents don’t make these historic changes easily. There are reasons that things are the way they are, usually deep and dense political reasons, and a President that needs to win 51 percent of voters across a wide spectrum of states and regions, and raise huge amounts of money to run a massive national campaign, doesn’t generally rush to shake up the status quo. The Presidents we revere historically for making progressive change weren’t exactly eager to do so. Abraham Lincoln did not go into office wanting or intending to emancipate the slaves. Teddy Roosevelt was open to reform but did little to nothing about food safety until the pressure kept building from the muckrakers and the book “The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair. Woodrow Wilson did nothing to help women’s suffrage until women started chaining themselves to the White House gate and getting arrested. FDR had to be constantly pushed by the labor movement to help on their agenda. And Jack and Bobby Kennedy had no plans to make civil rights a central issue in their legacy until the civil rights movement forced them to act. (more…)

I contacted the White House to give them my ideas regarding higher education. I believe states’ public colleges should pool their resources concerning online courses and offer two levels of degrees statewide. For example, in engineering something geared to Penn State might be level  one and to MIT level two.

This should greatly reduce the cost which could be passed on to the consumer/student. Eventually it could be done nationally, and the private schools could be brought into the mix as well.

If done properly, even minimum wage earners could afford to burn the midnight oil without huge debt at graduation. And as a country, we would be far more competitive which should increase jobs. That way everyone could get a college education, not just the rich and handful of lucky that get scholarships, which are hard to come by.

Bruce Sunderland
Conshohocken, Pa.

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By Michael Winship
Former senior writer at Bill Moyers Journal on PBS

The Detroit Tigers are retiring the great baseball manager Sparky Anderson’s number 11 this season. “It’s a wonderful gesture,” Detroit Free Press columnist Michael Rosenberg wrote. “I just wish Sparky could see it.”

Anderson won three World Series — one managing the Tigers, two with the Cincinnati Reds — and passed away this past November. Rosenberg said, “Retiring his number now is the baseball version of waiting until a relative dies to say thank you.”

That’s because it comes sixteen years after Anderson left the Tigers in a bitter feud with owner Mike Ilitch. Yet as Sparky once said, “I’ve got my faults, but living in the past is not one of them. There’s no future in it.”

I wish I could say the same, let bygones be bygones and the rest, but when it comes to two other baseball devotees, the Presidents Bush, it’s tough. Father and especially son left behind a heap of wreckage. (more…)

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

A sovereign nation investing its wealth in its domestic economy seems like a no-brainer, especially during a global recession. But in this crazy age of American politics, even that has become a controversial notion.

This is the subtext of a dispute that simmered beneath the pomp and circumstance of this week’s U.S.-China summit. As The New York Times previously reported, the Obama administration is calling on the World Trade Organization to use its power to halt the Chinese government’s wind-energy fund specifically because the money is “contingent on … manufacturers using parts made in China rather than foreign-made components.” The program, along with the Chinese regime’s broader domestic procurement requirements for wind farms, have helped the Chinese wind industry capture almost half of the global market for turbines.

Setting aside the bilateral wrangling over WTO arcana, China’s industrial policy success carries a basic lesson: When a nation couples public spending with incentives that encourage domestic corporate investment, an economy tends to grow its own wealth-building industries. That’s simple enough to understand, right?

Evidently, not within our own government. As “Buy China” policies now economically supercharge the world’s most populous nation, the White House and congressional Republicans have opposed many of the very “Buy America” proposals that might help us keep up—and that obstruction has come at a steep price. (more…)

By Robert Reich
Former U.S. Secretary of Labor, Professor at Berkeley

The President met with Republican leaders at the White House this week to talk about whether the Bush tax cuts should be extended to top taxpayers, as Republicans want.

No decision has been reached, but this is the first test of the President’s resolve with the new Congress – and he should be tough as nails. The economics and politics both dictate it.

President Barack Obama talks with Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Virginia), while Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) stands to the right, at the Oval Office private dining room on November 30, 2010. (Photo: Pete Souza / Official White House Photo)

Taxpayers in the top 1 percent don’t need it (they are now getting almost a quarter of all national income, the highest percent since 1928).

They don’t deserve it (they got the lion’s share of the benefits of the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts, and have had no reason to expect a continuation of their windfall).

They won’t spend it to stimulate the economy (top earners save a much higher proportion of their income than the middle class). (more…)