The GOP Recipe for Keeping the Economy Down Until Election 2012

Could it be that Republicans want to keep the economy struggling through Election Day, 2012?

 Robert Reich
Robert Reich's Blog
November 5, 2010

The real message from voters was “Fix this stinking economy.” But Republicans have no intention of doing so.

With Republicans in control of the House, forget spending increases or tax cuts to stimulate the economy.

Republicans don’t believe in stimulating economies. They think markets eventually clear — once the pain is sufficient. Or in the immortal words of Herbert Hoover’s treasury secretary, millionaire industrialist Andrew Mellon: “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmer, liquidate real estate. It will purge the rottenness out of the system. People will work harder, lead a more moral life.”

Of course, Mellon was dead wrong. Nothing was purged. Instead, the economy sunk into deeper and deeper depression.

So how do we get out of this bog?

By default, all the responsibility is on the Federal Reserve — which announced today (Wednesday) it will pump $600 billion into the economy between now and June to reduce long-term interest rates (“quantitative easing” in Fed-speak).

The Fed thinks lower long-term rates will (1) push more businesses to expand capacity and hire workers; (2) push the dollar downward and make American exports more competitive and therefore generate more jobs; and (3) allow more Americans to refinance their homes at low rates, thereby giving them more cash to spend and thereby stimulate more jobs.

But without an expansionary fiscal policy, the Fed’s goals are pipe dreams.

Lower rates won’t spur businesses to expand capacity and jobs because there aren’t enough consumers to buy additional goods and services.

Lower rates won’t push down the dollar and spur more exports. They’ll only spur more competitive devaluations by other nations determined not to lose export shares and jobs.

And lower rates won’t allow middle-class and working-class Americans to refinance their homes because banks won’t lend to families whose incomes have dropped, whose debts have risen, or who owe more on their homes than the homes are worth. That is, most of us.

Without an expansive fiscal policy that puts more money into the pockets of consumers and gets them out from under their huge debt load, the Fed’s billions will just fuel another stock-market bubble.

It’s already started. Stocks are up even though the rest of the economy is still down because money is already so cheap. Bondholders who can’t get much of any return from their loans are shifting into stocks. Companies are buying back more shares of their own stock. And Wall Street is making more bets in the stock market with money it can borrow at almost zero percent interest.

In other words, with Republicans in charge of the House, the economy remains anemic. It may even succumb to another bubble that bursts.

Could it be that Republicans want to keep the economy this way through Election Day, 2012?

Robert B. Reich has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. He also served on President Obama's transition advisory board. His latest book is Supercapitalism.

http://www.alternet.org/economy/148744/the_gop_recipe_for_keeping_the_economy_down_until_election_2012/

Copyright 2010 AlterNet

Republican Voters Send In The Clowns. Again.

SHAUN MULLEN
TMV COLUMNIST IN POLITICS.
The Moderate Voice
November 4, 2010



I want to revisit a “dynamic” that I’ve addressed several times in the run-up to the mid-term elections and again in this post yesterday: For all of the fulminating and chest pounding about change, Republican voters have re-elected the very leadership that helped George Bush drive the economy into a ditch and subsequently was responsible for losing the White House and both seats of Congress.

This is a leadership bereft of ideas, whether it is how to reduce the deficit or create jobs. This is a leadership that already is promising to continue the kind of obstructionist politics that frequently paralyzed the 111th Congress, leaving the job of trying to keep the U.S. from falling into an outright depression entirely to the Obama administration while it scratched Wall Street’s tummy and ignored the cries from Main Street for relief.

As I noted yesterday, people didn’t vote for or against a broken system on Tuesday, but rather for or against candidates, most of whom depend on that system’s perpetuation for their own survival. And in the end, the GOP leadership is far more concerned about keeping their jobs than righting the ship of state.

Is there an explanation for this bewildering state of affairs?

Please don’t hand me any crap about these clowns being sent back to Washington with a big pat on the back because they’re not Democrats. Because if that is your argument then voters have not only gotten the leaders they deserve, but they are as willfully stupid as those leaders.
Have at it, but please be nice.
http://themoderatevoice.com/91228/republican-voters-send-in-the-clowns-again/

© 2004-2010 The Moderate Voice

The Grand Old Plot Against the Tea Party

Frank Rich
Op-Ed Columnist
The New York Times
October 30, 2010

ONE dirty little secret of the 2010 election is that it won’t be a political tragedy for Democrats if a Tea Party icon like Sharron Angle or Joe Miller ends up in the United States Senate. Angle, now synonymous with racist ads sliming Hispanics, and Miller, already on record threatening a government shutdown, are fired up and ready to go as symbols of G.O.P. extremism for 2012 and beyond.

What’s not so secret is that some Republicans will be just as happy if some of these characters lose, and for the same reason.

But whatever Tuesday’s results, this much is certain: The Tea Party’s hopes for actually affecting change in Washington will start being dashed the morning after. The ordinary Americans in this movement lack the numbers and financial clout to muscle their way into the back rooms of Republican power no matter how well their candidates perform.

Trent Lott, the former Senate leader and current top-dog lobbyist, gave away the game in July. “We don’t need a lot of Jim DeMint disciples,” he said, referring to the South Carolina senator who is the Tea Party’s Capitol Hill patron saint. “As soon as they get here, we need to co-opt them.” It’s the players who wrote the checks for the G.O.P. surge, not those earnest folk in tri-corner hats, who plan to run the table in the next corporate takeover of Washington. Though Tom DeLay may now be on trial for corruption in Texas, the spirit of his K Street lives on in a Lott client listthat includes Northrop Grumman and Goldman Sachs.

Karl Rove outed the Republican elites’ contempt for Tea Partiers in the campaign’s final stretch. Much as Barack Obama thought he was safe soliloquizing about angry white Middle Americans clinging to “guns or religion” at a San Francisco fund-raiser in 2008, so Rove now parades his disdain for the same constituency when speaking to the European press. This month he told Der Spiegel that Tea Partiers are “not sophisticated,” and then scoffed, “It’s not like these people have read the economist Friedrich August von Hayek.” Given that Glenn Beck has made a cause of putting Hayek’s dense 1944 antigovernment treatise “The Road to Serfdom” on the best-seller list and Tea Partiers widely claim to have read it, Rove could hardly have been more condescending to “these people.” Last week, for added insult, he mocked Sarah Palin’s imminent Discovery Channel reality show to London’s Daily Telegraph.

This animus has not gone unnoticed among those supposedly less sophisticated conservatives back home. Mike Huckabee, still steamed about Rove’s previous put-down of Christine O’Donnell, publicly lamented the Republican establishment’s “elitism” and “country club attitude.” This country club elite, he said, is happy for Tea Partiers to put up signs, work the phones and make “those pesky little trips” door-to-door that it finds a frightful inconvenience. But the members won’t let the hoi polloi dine with them in the club’s “main dining room” — any more than David H. Koch, the billionaire sugar daddy of the Republican right, will invite O’Donnell into his box at the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center to take in “The Nutcracker.”

The main dining room remains reserved for Koch’s fellow oil barons, Lott’s clients, the corporate contributors (known and anonymous) to groups like Rove’s American Crossroads, and, of course, the large coterie of special interests underwriting John Boehner, the presumptive next speaker of the House. Boehner is the largest House recipient of Wall Street money this year — much of it from financial institutions bailed out by TARP.

His Senate counterpart, Mitch McConnell, will be certain to stop any Tea Party hillbillies from disrupting his chapter of the club (as he tried to stop Rand Paul in his own state’s G.O.P. primary). McConnell’s pets in his chamber’s freshman G.O.P. class will instead be old-school conservatives like Dan Coats (of Indiana), Rob Portman (of Ohio) and, if he squeaks in, Pat Toomey (of Pennsylvania). The first two are former lobbyists; Toomey ranthe corporate interest group, the Club for Growth. They can be counted on to execute an efficient distribution of corporate favors and pork after they make their latest swing through Capitol Hill’s revolving door.

What the Tea Party ostensibly wants most — less government spending and smaller federal deficits — is not remotely happening on the country club G.O.P.’s watch. The elites have no serious plans to cut anything except taxes and regulation of their favored industries. The party’s principal 2010 campaign document, its “Pledge to America,” doesn’t vow to cut even earmarks — which barely amount to a rounding error in the federal budget anyway. Boehner has also proposed a return to pre-crash 2008 levels in “nonsecurity” discretionary spending — another mere bagatelle ($105 billion) next to the current $1.3 trillion deficit. And that won’t be happening either, once the actual cuts in departments like Education, Transportation and Interior are specified to their constituencies.

Perhaps the campaign’s most telling exchange took place on Fox News two weeks ago, when the Tea Party-embracing Senate candidate in California, Carly Fiorina, was asked seven times by Chris Wallace to name “one single entitlement expenditure you’re willing to cut” in order “to extend all the Bush tax cuts, which would add 4 trillion to the deficit.”She never did. At least Angle and Paul have been honest about what they’d slash if in power — respectively Social Security and defense, where the big government spending actually resides.

That’s not happening either. McConnell has explained his only real priority for the new Congress with admirable candor. “The single most important thing we want to achieve,”he said, “is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” Any assault on Social Security would defeat that goal, and a serious shake-up of the Pentagon budget would alienate the neoconservative ideologues and military contractors who are far more important to the G.O.P. establishment than the “don’t tread on me” crowd.

For sure, the Republican elites found the Tea Party invaluable on the way to this Election Day. And not merely, as Huckabee has it, because they wanted its foot soldiers. What made the Tea Party most useful was that its loud populist message gave the G.O.P. just the cover it needed both to camouflage its corporate patrons and to rebrand itself as a party miraculously antithetical to the despised G.O.P. that gave us George W. Bush and record deficits only yesterday.

Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and Wall Street Journal have been arduous in promoting and inflating Tea Party events and celebrities to this propagandistic end. The more the Tea Party looks as if it’s calling the shots in the G.O.P., the easier it is to distract attention from those who are actually calling them — namely, those who’ve cashed in and cashed out as ordinary Americans lost their jobs, homes and 401(k)’s. Typical of this smokescreen is a new book titled “Mad as Hell,” published this fall by a Murdoch imprint. In it, the pollsters Scott Rasmussen and Douglas Schoen make the case, as they recently put it in Politico, that the Tea Party is “the most powerful and potent force in America.”

They are expert at producing poll numbers to bear that out. By counting those with friends and family in the movement, Rasmussen has calculated that 29 percent of Americans are “tied to” the Tea Party. (If you factor in six degrees of Kevin Bacon, the number would surely double.) But cooler empirical data reveal the truth known by the G.O.P. establishment: An August CNN poll found that 2 percent of Americans consider themselves active members of the Tea Party.

That result was confirmed last weekend by The Washington Post, which published the fruits of its months-long effort to contact every Tea Party group in the country. To this end, it enlisted the help of Tea Party Patriots, the only Tea Party umbrella group that actually can claim to be a spontaneous, bottom-up, grass roots organization rather than a front for the same old fat cats of the Republican right, from the Koch brothers to Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks. Tea Party Patriots has claimed anywhere from 2,300 to nearly 3,000 local affiliates, but even with its assistance, The Post could verify a total of only 647 Tea Party groups nationwide. Most had fewer than 50 members. The median amount of money each group had raised in 2010 was $800, nowhere near the entry fee for the country club.

But those Americans, like all the others on the short end of the 2008 crash, have reason to be mad as hell. And their numbers will surely grow once the Republican establishment’s panacea of tax cuts proves as ineffectual at creating jobs, saving homes and cutting deficits as the half-measures of the Obama White House and the Democratic Congress. The tempest, however, will not be contained within the tiny Tea Party but will instead overrun the Republican Party itself, where Palin, with Murdoch and Beck at her back, waits in the wings to “take back America” not just from Obama but from the G.O.P. country club elites now mocking her. By then — after another two years of political gridlock and economic sclerosis — the equally disillusioned right and left may have a showdown that makes this election year look as benign as Woodstock.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/opinion/31rich.html?_r=1&hp

Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

The Sanity of Our County Depends on Your Vote

What does it say about us that the most effective counterweight to the Tea Party is not a political party or leader, but a comedian?

Billy Wimsatt
AlterNet
October 29, 2010

My Fellow Sane Americans,

What does it say about us that the most effective counterweight to the Tea Party is not a political party or leader, but a comedian?

Will Jon Stewart's rally on Saturday impact the election on Tuesday? We hope so. Frankly, as professional sane people (cough cough), we have been slow to jump on this opportunity. Nearly one thousand rallies have been organized all over the country three days before the election, and the best part? We didn't even have to organize them! It's freaking amazing. All we have to do is show up and leverage the opportunity. But most of us are too busy doing our regularly scheduled Get Out The Vote activities to see this opportunity for what it is and seize the moment to make our message relevant in popular culture.

In the past few weeks, a bunch of us have pulled together some last minute actions. The goal is to transform Saturday events in people's minds from merely a giant Halloween party and comedy show on the mall into... a giant Halloween party and comedy show on the mall that inspires people to volunteer and vote between now and Tuesday.

We're calling our campaign VOTE SANITY. We have 50,000 large VOTE SANITY stickers and a bunch of signs for people to wear at the rally and then take home. We also have "I Voted Sanity" images for people to use as Facebook profile pictures, some hilarious videos and websites likeWelcome to Crazytown, and Young Voters: A Bigger Threat Than Bears, a Crazytown Quiz, and an actual ahem, totally scientific and unbiased vote that will be taking place in the crowd and online where people have the choice to "Vote Sanity" or "Vote Fear." It's all thrown together fast but the idea is still pretty cute. The VoteFear.com website is sponsored by Republicorp. Then right after the rally, on Sunday, it's Halloween and Trick or Vote is ready with a huge nationwide canvass-in-costume.

Don't get us wrong. We have nothing against crazy people or scary monsters. Some of our best friends are crazy scary monsters. We just don't want to wake up on Wednesday morning and find out that they are in charge of our government again.

Vote Sanity is clearly a great message for all of us to be using right now. Not that we need to drop all our other messages. But we do need to become more nimble. I'm actually working 24/7 on another project right now called TheBallot.orgwhich aggregates all the local progressive voter guides in the country --it's a really important project. Every progressive voter in America needs a voter guide. I'm not about to drop this for Vote Sanity. But the beauty of Vote Sanity is that it connects perfectly with any other progressive message. See, here's a Vote Sanity logo with TheBallot.org on the bottom. You can do the same thing.

On behalf of professional leftists everywhere, I apologize for not starting earlier. We could have printed five million stickers and posters, sent some to your town, gotten on TV and made this really big. In the meantime, we encourage you to spread these images online and make your own Vote Sanity stickers, signs, images, videos, designs and tweet them @votesanity.

( more )


Copyright 2010 AlterNet.org

You’ve Heard the Lies, Now Believe the Facts

Gene Lyons
TheUnion.com
October 28th, 2010

Anybody seeking midterm-election predictions needs to look somewhere else. Here at the sprawling rural campus of Unsolicited Opinions Inc., company policy forbids palm-reading, crystal balls, tea leaves, bird augury and necromancy of all kinds. Weather forecasts can be useful; otherwise, it’s amazing how much time a person can save by skipping news stories about what may happen tomorrow.

That said, let’s face it: Any president who’d taken the oath of office last year would definitely be wading through what President Bush the Elder called “deep doo-doo” today. Given the economic catastrophe he inherited, it’s a wonder Barack Obama remains as popular as he is. A recent Newsweek poll showed his approval rating at 54 percent, up six points from September — a result so counterintuitive the magazine’s editors halfway implied they didn’t believe it.

Particularly at election time, nobody’s allowed to insult the American voter by wondering whether Obama’s surge in popularity might simply be a result of more TV time. “Oh yeah, that guy. Gee, he’s got a terrific smile.”

OK, maybe that’s an exaggeration, although a recent Pew survey showed that only 59 percent of Americans can name the vice-president. Just 72 percent realize which party currently controls Congress.

Even so, to paraphrase Will Rogers, when it comes to the economy the president’s biggest problem isn’t so much what voters don’t know as the things they know for sure that just ain’t so.

“The dirty little secret,” writes Washington Post financial columnist Steven Pearlstein, “is that most Americans don’t really know what they think about the issues that so animate the political conversation in Washington, and what they think they know about them is often wrong.”

The list of public misconceptions is long and politically crippling. Maybe the single most damaging is that the Obama administration has brought about an epidemic of government spending, tripling the yearly budget deficit and vastly increasing the national debt.

Never happened. History records that President George W. Bush, who inherited a $236 billion government surplus from the Clinton administration in 2001, handed President Obama a stacked deck eight years later.

The Congressional Budget Office’s projected budget deficit for FY2009, beginning four months before Obama took office, was already in excess of $1.3 trillion. Indeed, the 2011 budget deficit is projected to be ever-so-slightly lower than the one Bush left on the White House doorstep. Despite the one-time $787 billion economic stimulus (spread over three years), no huge growth in government spending has taken place on Obama’s watch.

Three proximate causes of the rising national debt remain: the Bush tax cuts of 2001, his unfunded Medicare drug benefit, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Alas, stating these historical facts has been declared out of bounds. It’s playing the “blame game,” a formulation greatly persuasive to tea partiers and conservative talk-show hosts basically because it rhymes.

Yes, the United States needs to get its fiscal affairs back to where they were under the previous Democratic administration. But not by slashing spending and laying off government employees during an economic crisis, as it appears the British people, to their collective sorrow, are doomed to relearn.

People have heard Republicans say “the failed stimulus” so often that many believe it. Again, according to the CBO, the (clearly inadequate) American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan resulted in approximately 3 million jobs, the difference between a lingering recession and a full-blown depression, most economists would say.

Also, many people swear Obama raised their taxes. Actually, he cut them. Almost one-third of the stimulus consisted of tax cuts, not spending. But because the money reached people in small increments through decreased withholding, most don’t know it.

And, no, it wasn’t the Obama administration that bailed out Wall Street. The Bush administration enacted TARP in October 2008, although most Democrats (Obama included) voted for it. We’d all like to see more high-flying Wall Street fraudsters locked up, but TARP did succeed in saving the financial system while paying for itself.

Ditto the auto industry bailouts, an unfortunate necessity also first initiated by the Bush administration that’s basically worked. Do you really think Americans would be better off without General Motors?

No you don’t.

Even so, “Things could have been much worse” isn’t much of a campaign slogan. Moreover, Obama has only himself to blame for the oddly diffident way he’s gone about explaining himself. Far from being a condescending elitist, the president has tended to give voters a lot more credit than they deserve.

Hence many of the same dreamers who convinced themselves that the Merry-Go-Round of constantly rising real estate values would help them borrow their way to prosperity now trust that the simplistic nostrums of the tea party will lead us safely past Big Rock Candy Mountain and all the way back to Leave it to Beaver-Land.

http://blog.cagle.com/2010/10/28/youve-heard-the-lies-now-believe-the-facts/

© 2005 - 2010 Swift Communications, Inc.

Kiss of Death - Richard Hannah Endorsed by Rudy Giuliani!!! - NY-House 24

Rudy Giuliani and Bernie Kerk in former days before Kerk conviction.

Richard Hanna , candidate for the NY House-24th, recently received the endorsement of Rudy Giuliani. Hanna at one time had a lead in the polls 46% to 43% over Mike Arcuri. The recent poll has it 47% to 37% Arcuri over Hanna. It seems Giuliani "Kiss of Death" has had an effect on the race. The former mayor of New York City, "Mister 9-11" and a good friend of Bernie Kerk, has been offering his support to any republican candidate he can find.

"The evil that men do lives after their mayoral stints—and even 9/11"

Sarah Palin: Diva and Political Whore

Description of Political Whore- A political figure who will sell out anyone for  personal enrichment and media attention  if it means they might get one step higher on the ladder.

Syrin
Syrin's Blog
Wasilla, Alaska
OCT 21, 2010

Late last Friday afternoon, Palin’s political aide, Andy Davis, contacted officials with a competitive House campaign. Palin would be available Tuesday, Davis said.

As with Grassley, the reaction of the House campaign was to have Palin do a fundraiser.

“What [the candidate] needs more than anything else is money,” said a GOP source familiar with the situation.

No-go, replied Davis, indicating that not only did she not want to raise money, but she also didn’t want to do a rally. The preference was for something “low-key,” so Davis suggested visiting a factory or going door to door. But in doing so, the candidate would have to limit the exposure of the event. They could bring only one “trusted local reporter” along, Davis said, according to a source familiar with the exchange.

Without much media attention, such a grass-roots event would have done next to nothing for the candidate, said the source close to the situation. But the campaign — a lean operation, like those of most House candidates — scrambled to put together another plan that would accommodate Palin. They sent it to Davis on Saturday.

The campaign didn’t get word until Monday morning, the day before the event was to take place, that Palin’s schedule had changed. She couldn’t come. Palin offered no reason for the no-show.

After the experience, the campaign, filled with conservatives who thought well of Palin, began referring to her as “Princess Sarah,” said the source close to the situation.

Another House client of this same person had the same experience — little notice of availability and heavy restrictions on the nature of the event. This candidate, though, is still trying to land Palin for a rally, so few other details were divulged.

And the list goes on.
One major GOP Senate campaign sought Palin’s endorsement at the beginning of the year but didn’t know how to reach her. Out of desperation, they ended up sending a message to her Facebook page. Having never heard back, an operative for the campaign asked a reporter for the e-mail address of Palin’s representative at the time. The campaign got a noncommittal reply.

Then, one day months later, the campaign was told Palin was going to offer her endorsement. They waited for much of the day, frequently checking her Facebook and Twitter page. Finally, a consultant to the campaign put a call into somebody close to Palin and asked if the endorsement was still coming.

“We were told it was going to happen in an hour, and she was going to tweet it,” recounted an operative on the campaign. “But we waited and waited and waited, and it never happened. Then we never heard of it again.”

Some of the complaints are, as Palin sympathizers suggest, partly due to frustration from campaigns that they didn’t get touched.

A source close to losing GOP gubernatorial candidate Bill McCollum, for example, recounted a months-long process of trying to woo Palin only to get radio silence, flashes of hope and then signs that she may go with his primary opponent.

In some, but not all, cases, Palin charges campaigns for travel expenses. Georgia Republican gubernatorial hopeful Karen Handel, for example, shelled out nearly $100,000 from her campaign account to get Palin for a pre-runoff rally earlier this year.

“I don’t know of anyone else who does that,” said a longtime GOP consultant.  Palin is  in most of their races seen as toxic with independent thinking voters.

Read More

http://aksyrin.wordpress.com/2010/10/21/sarah-palin-diva-and-political-whore/

Copyright 2010 Syrin From Wasilla