Grabbing the Bull by the Horns



From "Day of Rage" on Wall Street, March 2011



The same folks who marched on the New York Stock Exchange last spring, and then camped out in protest for three weeks in front of City Hall earlier this summer, will be back on The Street on Aug. 2.  That's the same day the United States is due to default if the radical right wing of Congress succeeds in pulling off its internal coup d'etat.  No better way to celebrate Debt Ceiling Armageddon and let your voices be heard than to join New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts once again.

These people actually have a little money now.  A baker's dozen of them ("The Bloombergville 13") were arrested last month for disorderly conduct during their marathon street fest/sleepover.  They have $700 left over from their defense fund, and are funneling it back into their movement:  signs, bullhorns, all the paraphernalia for another peaceful but loud protest.  (The first big event was in March.  Called "Day of Rage", it attracted thousands of marchers and no corporate media coverage.  I first learned about it from  Al Jazeera.)



New York's Finest Rousts the Happy Campers from Bloombergville

Here's the official announcement for the Big Event, courtesy of New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts:

Oppose Cutbacks And Austerity Of Any Kind
Gather at 4:30: Meet At The Bull, Just South Of Broadway And Morris Street, At The North End Of Bowling Green Park
As the two U.S. political parties unite to dismantle Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security, it’s clear:
The bankers are looting decades-old peoples’ programs and the Democrats can’t help us. Obama can’t help us. Elected officials can’t help us.
It’s time for the people to meet and take the bull by the horns!
The students, union activists, and others who organized "Bloombergville" -- the three-week anti-austerity occupation on Wall Street’s doorstep -- have called for an August 2 General Assembly/Speakout on Wall Street, at the bull, from 4:30 to 7, to protest the ongoing pro-bank, anti-people cutbacks and gather into working groups to plan for the September 17 occupation of Wall Street.

This is a call for every teacher, home health aid, parent, student, tenant, librarian, city/state employee, childcare provider, nurse, patient, employed or unemployed worker or recipient of Social Security or any type of public assistance: on August 2 come to Wall Street – the scene of the crimes now being perpetrated on the people – and make your voice heard!

The current depression-level crisis is not due to lack of revenue. It’s due to theft. The trillions that the banks are sitting on right now? That’s our money. Whether through taxes; the looting of pension and social security contributions; or the wealth we created from our labor – all of that belongs to us. Come to Wall Street August 2 and strategize -- on how to get that back!

A Tale of Two Emails

I get emails all the time from one progressive group or another, asking me to call my congresspeople for one cause or another -- usually to either support or oppose some pending piece of legislation.

But today was a first from a presidential campaign asking me to help to phone-bomb the opposition and then report back to Chicage HQ to let them know "how the call went."

President Obama's campaign speech address to the American People the other night included just such a call to action, to bombard Congress and let them know we want more of that cool bipartishit and that we want to be compromised even more.  People apparently listened and crashed several congressional websites and tied up the Capitol phone lines.  Must have driven the Republican staffers nuts.

I guess the thrill has worn off, because I just got another email from Obama Campaign Chief Jim Messina.  He notes that since my own particular congressman and senators are all Democrats, I should just call John Boehner direct (202.225.0600) and then report back to Obamaland. (I guess Obama doesn't really mean it when he blames his own party, too, for their alleged bargaining intransigence. When he says he wants to take heat from his own party, I think what he really means is he wants to just bask in its glow)  From the Messina missive:

Here's what's happening: President Obama proposed the balanced approach of raising the debt ceiling paired with responsible steps to reduce our country's long-term debt --  groveling before and begging asking oil companies, corporations, and the richest Americans to do their part rather than shoving austerity down the throats of placing the entire burden on seniors and the middle class.

A deal has been close at times, but an ideological faction of House Republicans has been effectively holding our economy hostage -- making extreme demands like ending Medicare as we know it, gutting Social Security, and rejecting any compromises that might make millionaires or big corporations pay their fair share to end the obscene wealth disparity and create jobs get our debt under control.

Don't Quit Me, John

Our records show you have only Democratic representatives in Congress. But House Speaker John Boehner -- who is leading the Republicans in negotiations -- needs to hear what I want you to tell him Americans like you think.

Here's what the President said on Monday:

"The American people may have voted for divided government, but they didn't vote for a dysfunctional government. So I'm asking you all to make your voice heard. If you want a balanced approach to reducing the deficit, let your member of Congress know. If you believe we can solve this problem through compromise, send that message."

The President doesn't make a direct request of all of us like this very often. Take a minute right now to call Speaker Boehner -- then let us know how it went, so we can figure out just how dwindling out base of support really is.

Thanks,
Messina

I don't want any more compromise. I don't want a balanced approach, which stands for continued corporate welfare for the rich, with just a tad of chained CPI on my future Social Security benefits.  I don't think it's a good idea to raise the Medicare eligibility age to "balance out" the beleaguered wealthy "folks" losing mortgage deductions on their vacation homes.  We the People have been compromised enough.

Right after the Messina missive arrived, I got another email from Showdown in America also asking that I call Congress, for an entirely different reason:

You can make a real difference and change the debate in Washington today.

Call your Representative and tell them to Make Wall Street Pay their fair share to raise revenues and create jobs.

Let your Representative know you won't stand for cuts to Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare—and neither should they!

We're not in a debt crisis; we're in a revenue crisis. And it's high time the folks that broke the economy—Wall Street, Bank of America, big banks, oil companies, and big boys—paid their fair share to fix it. It's time to change the debate in Washington.

On second thought, I believe I will take Messina's advice and call Boehner..... using the script from Showdown in America.  Then I will report back to Chicago Obama HQ and and let them know what I said, and how it went.  If you, too, want to call the Weeper and complain, here's a suggested talking point: 

 Politicians never tire of tropes, and there’s one tickling many on their tongues these days: Americans want Washington to deal with its debt, just like we do in our own families. Which is funny, given that American families have never been so deeply indebted. In 2004, total U.S. family debt exceeded income for the first time since the Federal Reserve began tracking it, according to a Center for American Progress report.

It was the best of times, it is the worst of times.

Update 7/28:  I got through to Boehner's office and talked to a living person. I then reported my call to Messina.  In the answer box titled "How did (blank) respond to your request for bipartisanship in debt ceiling negotiations", I wrote: "First, I don't care about the debt ceiling phony crisis and I told her so.  I said I cared about jobs, jobs and nothing but the jobs.  I said I didn't want him and Obama reaching any Grand Bargain about my future social security benefits. She said 'Thank You Very Much.  I will see to it that the Speaker is made aware of your concerns.' (pure boilerplate constituent-speak).

From the New Deal to a Raw Deal

But do you know what people are fed up with most of all?
They’re fed up with a town where compromise has become a dirty word. They work all day long, many of them scraping by, just to put food on the table. And when these Americans come home at night, bone-tired, and turn on the news, all they see is the same partisan three-ring circus here in Washington. They see leaders who can’t seem to come together and do what it takes to make life just a little bit better for ordinary Americans. They’re offended by that. And they should be. -- Barack Obama's Speech, 7/25/11

Clueless much?


What should offend most people is the fact that Washington (and that includes Obama) has taken the humanitarian crisis of massive and unrelenting unemployment and turned it into an utterly phony Debt Ceiling/Deficit Crisis. And what passes for TV news has turned journalism on its ear.  Rather than Republican seditionists being called out for what they are, they are given equal time in the name of "fair and balanced".  The pundit class and the President are on the same page in thinking (or pretending to think) that Republicans actually have the interests of the country at heart. Begging traitors and terrorists to make deals is symptomatic not only of political weakness, but a kind of pathological complicity.  And we are supposed to  feel sorry for a beleagured president as he asks us to call Congress and demand some niceties. And help his re-election, of course.


(The fact that John Boehner lied through his teeth in his follow-up riposte should come as no surprise.  Like many a mendacious psychopath, he could probably pass a polygraph test with flying colors -- he has no conscience, no shame.)


Obama took some precious TV bully pulpit prime time and wasted it.  He could have reassured the nation and announced that he would invoke the 14th Amendment and unilaterally raise the debt ceiling. Of course, that would not have been in keeping with the maintenance of National Crisis Mode, and would have ruined the 11th hour rescue in which he unilaterally orders the Debt Ceiling raised anyway, and makes us all so grateful we will become true believers in cutting Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security to save them.  Instead of mouthing the same tired platitudes of shared family sacrifice and timidly "asking" hedge fund managers to pay just a little more, he could have called for an increase in the FICA tax on only the first hundred grand to "protect Social Security for future generations." (Congressman Dennis Kucinich is pointing to the many occasions when Candidate O promised just this option.)


Kucinich asks: "In a lifetime, will our party have journeyed from the New Deal to the Raw Deal?"


Exactly.... and the journey to perdition is commencing at such breathtaking speed, we are left sitting open-mouthed, not knowing what has even hit us. Or, as Paul Krugman put it in his blog today: "Meh, Bleh and Eek."

Update: Speaking of mendacity and cluelessness, Dean Baker now writes that Obama committed a real bad gaffe (or lied) about the origins of the deficit. Obama blamed the trillions number purely on the Bush tax cuts and wars. But according to Baker:

The huge deficits came about entirely as a result of the economic downturn brought about by the collapse of the housing bubble. This misunderstanding of the origins of the budget deficit could explain President Obama’s willingness to make large cuts to core social welfare programs, like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

Do you think that Obama's "misunderstanding" has anything to do with the fact that his treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, was chairman of the NY Fed during the bubble and collapse --  that he was asleep at the switch or complicit when the banks were recklessly funding and investing in and selling toxic subprime mortgages?  Or that his current Chief of Staff, Megabanker Bill Daley, was on the board of the public/private Fannie Mae when it was buying up Countrywide mortgages and enriching its CEOs with obscene bonuses even as it too burst from the bubble of its own  greed?  The Oval Office is a corporate racket, notwithstanding the equally corrupt lunatics of the Republican wing of the Uniparty.  Obama's minions are among the tangled web of culprits who helped cause the suffering that just won't stop, the ones who left we the taxpayers holding the bag. Not only have they never been held to account, they have been rewarded with the job of running the  country.  And yet we still wonder why Obama is doing nothing about jobs for the rest of us.

Bargain Hunter in Chief

Standard & Poors, the same credit rating agency that gave AAA ratings to Enron just a few days before it went bust, the same tool of Wall Street that said subprime mortgage-backed securities were just dandy investments, now runs the United States.  Actually, Wall Street and the "jittery investors" and the profit-bloated corporations run the United States, and S&P is just the messenger.  Either you lower the deficit by four trillion at the same time you raise the debt ceiling, or we will give you a bad score, USA!  The four trillion in cuts, of course, is the same figure Obama has proffered to the Republicans, with no urging from them at all.


He said he wanted a Grand Bargain with revenues, but the latest scuttlebut this morning is that Harry Reid agreed to a 2.7 trillion cut with no revenues.  And the world is ending, so President Obama will have no choice but to "cave" to the GOP yet again.  And he'll claim he is a responsible adult for doing so, and that he must now be re-elected as the hero who allowed Grandma to get her social security check this month. 


This is all pre-arranged bullshit, of course.  His only goal is his own re-election and to hell with the Depression and 20 percent real unemployment and actual people.  It'll be interesting to see what he will campaign on now.  The Joy of Suffering?  Masochism for the Masses?


I'd love to see a contingent of congressional Democrats converging on the White House to inform the president that he no longer enjoys support from his own party and should give up seeking a second term. In my dreams of course.


Let's start another thread.  The situation will likely be changing by the hour.  It's all part of Kabuki Suspense Armageddon Theater, and we're just the little people in the peanut gallery.

Imagine......

David Brooks probably thought he was cleverly channeling John Lennon in his New York Times column today.  He could barely contain his glee in his latest screed, titled "The Grand Bargain Lives!" 

Imagine  there's no heaven you’re a member of Congress. You have your own preferred way to screw your constituents reduce debt. If you’re a Democrat, it probably involves protecting your own sorry asses Medicare and raising taxes. If you’re a Republican, it probably involves cutting the throats of the masses spending, killing reforming Medicare and keeping taxes imaginary low....

.....You are being asked to support a foggy approach, not a specific plan. You are being asked to do this even though you have no faith in the other party and limited faith in the leadership of your own. You are being asked to risk your political life for an approach that bears little resemblance to what you would ideally prefer.
Do you do this? I think you do.

You do it because all the other options are worse. Doing nothing could lead to default and the end of The Oligarchy American economic supremacy.*

I really should stop reading Bobo.  I don't have a blood pressure cuff in the house, but if I did it would have exploded.  I fired off a response, and The Times in its infinite wisdom is holding it in the censorship bin***.  I guess they are afraid it might cause the underarms of David's Brooks Brothers shirt to dampen with odorless dew.... not that he actually reads any of the comments.  His glasses would shatter.

Dear David......

Imagine you're a member of the dwindling middle class, you have junk or no health insurance, and you are facing wage cuts while your boss expects you to do twice the work. Imagine you face a choice between paying your rent or your electric bill this month. Imagine you're a jobless 62-year-old widow counting the days for your Medicare and Social Security benefits to kick in and hope against hope you don't get sick for the next three years. Imagine you're an elementary school student whose house just got foreclosed because your father lost his job and now you all have to live in a seedy motel. Imagine when you go back to school in the fall, your class size has grown to 50 because the district just laid off a thousand teachers. Imagine that you turn on your TV (assuming you still have cable) and you see some empty suit spewing nonsense about a Grand Bargain. Imagine if you or a family member depends on a paltry Social Security check and the president you elected cavalierly now declares that check may just not make it on the 3rd of the month. And just go eat your peas and suffer with joy.

Imagine if you will that the Beltway pundits and the politicians they cheerlead had to change places with the real Americans. Would you care about the deficit and the debt ceiling then? Somehow, I doubt it. Would you re-elect any of the politicians who are literally pulling the rug out from under millions of people? I doubt that too. 

So live on in your dream world and consider that the real people, the genuine human beings in this country, have run out of options. And then write another fun column about The Grand Bargain, and see if anyone cares.
Love, Karen **

Get Out the Wire Hangers and Clean This Mess Up!

* Vetted and approved by the White House Ministry of Truth Office of Public Engagement.

** Cross-posted on "Off Times Square", RealityChex.com

*** Cross-posted much later by NYT Comment Moderators upon surviving the vetting process after all. I apologize for the redundancies!

A Possible Organic Explanation for Michele Bachmann

I had an ah-ha moment today when I read about the Michele Bachmann migraine revelation.  I don't pretend to be a diagnostician, but I have read my Oliver Sacks and I  know some sufferers. What is fascinating about this neurological disorder is the pre-migraine "aura" experienced by many victims.  It has been described variously as a dream-like, religious experience or an LSD-like episode replete with visuals.  It may even be neurologically related to the "white light" phenomenon of the near-death experience, leading some people to embrace religion after coming back from the great beyond.


Bachmann has previously described a dream of God telling her to run for office.  The apostle Paul may have been undergoing a migraine aura when he suffered his sudden blindness and then had his vision of Jesus telling him to go forth.  The medieval mystic nun Hildegard of Bingen apparently tripped on so-called "scintillating scotoma" before her own blinding pain hit.


In a poem called "God Speaks to Me in Headache" LoveMinus0 writes:

When I get a migraine, I feel fundamentally religious
and drop to my knees in the pre-formatted position
for prayer: forgiveness, relief and reconciliation.

My temple is filled with holy resonance
and spiritual compression; eyes shut - doors sealed.
Hands grasp desperately over my ears, searching for
The Door.....

And beyond the mysticism of the aura, migraine sufferer Joan Didion writes:  “There certainly is what doctors call a ‘migraine personality,’ and that personality tends to be ambitious, inward, intolerant of error, rather rigidly organized, perfectionist."

Something to think about.  I now find myself actually empathizing with Michele Bachmann.  My desire to see her not become president has nothing to do with her health issues.  And whatever Rovian smear campaign that has sprung up accusing her of being some kind of drug addict is pretty despicable. 



Hildegard of Bingen's Migraine



Ummm.... It IS the Economy, Stupid

New York Times economy writer David Leonhardt, falling in line with the  Administration's full court PR charm offensive on "How to Share the Sacrifice and Learn to Love It", has written a piece on how Team Obama thinks it can win even though the economy stinks. (Thanks, "DraftSpitzer", for sending the link).

Another article in today's Times today gushes how "buoyed" Obama is now that there is some real bipartishit coming out of Congress.  Apparently, the fact that the Uniparty can agree to impose suffering on the masses and enrich the corporations is cause for celebration.  As long as it puts the president in a good mood, what more could we peasants ask for?  To further lift him out of his doldrums, the aptly named Moody's is walking back its Debt Ceiling Doom rating threat.
   
The "Headwind" headline is ripped straight from the obsessive-compulsive brain of whatever White House PR hack writes the  speeches.  The president can't get enough of the temporary headwinds buffeting the economy and which, of course, are merely passing zephyrs in his Panglossian world vision --- the Japanese earthquake is still sending shock waves across the ocean, says he.  Then there are those rising gas prices, which actually started falling even before he unnecessarily released the oil reserves.  And those misleading, increasing unemployment numbers, which are always flukes and always so much shockingly higher than expected, even though teachers by the thousands are being laid off this summer, when school's out and nobody notices.

But this excerpt is the real giveaway that Leonhardt's piece came indirectly from Orwell's Ministry of Truth the Obama '12 machine:

The clearest statement of this idea has come from David Plouffe, Mr. Obama’s top political adviser. “The average American does not view the economy through the prism of G.D.P. or unemployment rates or even monthly jobs numbers,” Mr. Plouffe said at a recent Bloomberg Breakfast here. “People won’t vote based on the unemployment rate. They’re going to vote based on: ‘How do I feel about my own situation? Do I believe the president makes decisions based on me and my family?’ ”
Not surprisingly, Republicans seized on the comment to say the White House was out of touch. They are preparing to follow the path of not only Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign, but also — in slogans, if not policies — Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign, which coined “It’s the economy, stupid.”

Actually, it wasn't  the Republicans who first seized upon Plouffe's ham-handed bluster.  The Progressive blogosphere glommed onto it first.  A recent phenomenon I have noticed is that whenever liberals take Obama to task for his latest outbreak of conservativism, Republicans seize upon the criticism, making Obama their instant victim without having to expend much effort  themselves.  Not much we can do about that, except to say over and over again to David Brooks and William Kristol and Charles Krauthhammer:  Take him -- he's yours!  He wants to rip up the social safety net as much as you do.  He is embracing the latest Baby Grand (son of big Grand) Bargain from the Gang of Six or Seven even though he hasn't even read the thing yet.  It is still in its fetal stage: two pages of bullet points.

Nowhere in his article does Leonhardt mention the pushback against Obama from his former supporters. As of 7:30 a.m. today, all 19 reader comments posted to the Leonhardt story were Obama-negatives from the usual liberal crowd.  And not one clothespin (hold your nose, lesser of two evils) voter among them.  More and more, it's not the Economy Stupide.  It's the fact that a Democratic president is thinking about cutting Social Security and Medicare and other domestic programs during what is increasingly looking like a Long Depression.