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Longwood Gardens. February, 2013. Photo by joanneleon.
Emerson, Lake & Palmer - Lucky man
News and Opinion
This article is from the American Prospect, written by Robert Kuttner. Many of you have probably read it already. This paints Obama as the unfortunate, incompetent negotiator again. I don't buy that characterization anymore, not after his relentless support of the Simpson-Bowles catfood commission, a front for Pete Peterson and the 1%. He jumped through hoops to get that commission and to make sure this sequester was in the bill in 2011. Cameron is facing a triple dip recession and yet he and his administration are plowing ahead on austerity and more austerity, doubling down instead of changing course. Obama is doing the same. If we are believing that line about Obama miscalculating, we are looking at it from the wrong perspective, the perspective of the middle class that he claims he wants to revive. We should look at things from the perspective of the 1%, whom he serves. Things are looking better and better for them all the time. This country is on a train that is rolling back to the pre-FDR era, something the 1% has wanted for a long, long time. I agree with everything that Kuttner is saying and all of his analysis except the part where he claims that Obama made mistakes or miscalculations.
The Sequestering of Barack Obama
Unless the president compels Congress to change course, the economy faces a future of endless fiscal cliffs.
President Obama has miscalculated both the tactical politics of the sequester and the depressive economic impact of budget cuts on the rest of his presidency. [...]
Obama’s miscalculation began in his fist term, with his embrace of the premise that substantial deficit cutting was both politically expected and economically necessary, and his appointment of the 2010 Bowles-Simpson Commission as the expression of that mistaken philosophy. Although the Commission’s plan was never carried out, its prestige and Obama’s parentage of it locked the president into a deflationary deficit reduction path.
[...]
Although the New Year’s deal averting the fiscal cliff was generally declared a tactical victory for the president, Republicans won on all the details that matter. The original cliff, you’ll recall, was the simultaneous sunset of the Bush tax cuts, the end of the two-point temporary reduction in payroll taxes, the spending cuts mandated by the sequester, and the expiration of extended unemployment insurance. President Obama maneuvered Speaker of the House John Boehner into a corner where Republicans were forced to renege on their solemn pledge about not taxing the rich. Obama did not, as some feared, throw Social Security or Medicare into the pot. He seemed to savor his new role as hard bargainer rather than conciliator.
But a closer look suggests how little Obama won. The taxes on the top 1 percent will bring in only about $620 billion in the coming decade, far less than Obama had sought, leaving more money to be taken out of spending later on. The overall deal cuts taxes during the same decade by about $3.6 trillion, some of which is an extension of the Bush income tax cuts to the middle class but much of which is the renewal of business tax preferences. The 2 percent hike in payroll taxes will cost working people close to a trillion dollars of disposable income over a decade. It is a far bigger tax increase in percentage terms than the tax hike on the top 1 percent. The deal was touted as raising taxes only on the rich, but that widely reported description overlooked that payroll taxes are, actually, taxes. Both parties agreed to make further spending cuts into the trillions of dollars, details to be determined later.
Nor did Republicans accept Obama’s demand to stop playing games with the debt ceiling once and for all, and the impact of the automatic sequester was delayed by only two months until March 1. So the immediate business before Congress is more spending cuts, with or without the sequester—the only question is how deep. Boehner was right to take the deal. As Pyrrhus, King of Epirus, said in similar circumstances, one more such victory and we are undone.
That article comes from The American Prospect. From their
wikipedia entry:
Notable recent contributors to the magazine and blog have included Michelle Goldberg, Harold Meyerson, Robert Kuttner and Matt Yglesias. Past contributors include Jonathan Chait, Jonathan Cohn, Joshua Green, Joshua Micah Marshall, Jedediah Purdy, Chris Mooney, Matthew Yglesias, Michael Massing, Joe Conason, Michael Tomasky, Ezra Klein, and Scott Stossel. Recent executive editors have included (from oldest to latest) Michael Tomasky, Harold Meyerson, and Mark Schmitt.
Lanny Breuer's replacement. Friday is his last day, hurrah!
DOJ Names Acting Leader of Criminal Division
In Breuer's front office, Raman has served as the principal deputy assistant attorney general since September 2009. Her federal prosecution career began in 1996 as a trial attorney in DOJ's Narcotics and and Dangerous Drug Section. Other roles have included appellate chief in the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Maryland and senior counsel to the deputy attorney general.
Bob Woodward says White House told him he would regret criticism
WASHINGTON, Feb 27 (Reuters) - Journalist Bob Woodward on Wednesday said a senior White House official told him he would "regret" taking issue in recent days with President Barack Obama's version of how across-the-board budget cuts came to be.
Woodward, who challenged the White House account in an article on Sunday, said a "very senior" White House official sent him an email in which, "It was said very clearly, 'You will regret doing this.'"
[...]
Last week, Woodward published an opinion piece in the Washington Post - where he is an associate editor - saying the administration was "wrong" to blame the cuts on Republicans.
Woodward has been on several news networks reporting about the email where the White House senior official told him he would regret staking out that claim (that this sequester was part of Obama's grand bargain deal or that he was responsible for it). It's pretty clear that he was not happy about what he perceived as a threat. Buzzfeed says that Gene Sperling was the one who did it. Sperling also shut down Jessica Yellen when she tried to talk about how the sequester came about. Also, earlier in the day Woodward said that it was "madness" for Obama to delay the deployment of an aircraft carrier to the Middle East, citing the defense budget cuts. I can't understand why the Obama admin. is choosing to fight this particular battle with Woodward since there is so much evidence that he threatened to veto the bill if the sequester/triggers were removed. I don't see how they win this and now that Woodward is not backing down... it's not a smart move. I don't care for Woodward myself, but they can't smear or dismiss him as an Obama hater -- this is the guy who took down Nixon, a Republican, and I don't know how they paint him as a journalist who goes after Democrats, etc.
Woodward at war
Bob Woodward called a senior White House official last week to tell him that in a piece in that weekend’s Washington Post, he was going to question President Barack Obama’s account of how sequestration came about - and got a major-league brushback. The Obama aide “yelled at me for about a half hour,” Woodward told us in an hour-long interview yesterday around the Georgetown dining room table where so many generations of Washington’s powerful have spilled their secrets.
[...]
“They have to be willing to live in the world where they’re challenged,” Woodward continued in his calm, instantly recognizable voice. “I’ve tangled with lots of these people. But suppose there’s a young reporter who’s only had a couple of years — or 10 years’ — experience and the White House is sending him an email saying, ‘You’re going to regret this.’ You know, tremble, tremble. I don’t think it’s the way to operate.”
A White House official said: "Of course no threat was intended. As Mr. Woodward noted, the email from the aide was sent to apologize for voices being raised in their previous conversation. The note suggested that Mr. Woodward would regret the observation."
Woodward — first in “The Price of Politics,” his bestseller on the failed quest for a grand budget bargain, and later with his opinion piece in The Post — makes plain that sequestration was an idea crafted by the White House. Obama personally approved the plan and later signed it into law. Woodward was right, several congressional officials involved in the talks told us.
David Dayen calls this article by Jeffrey Sachs "ferocious". And this is another reason why the Obama admin should back off Woodward.
Obama has always planned to slash spending
[...] Many of the pending cuts are indeed ill-advised, but the surprising truth is that from the start of his presidency Mr Obama has planned a steep decrease in discretionary spending as a share of national income.
[...] These tax cuts were unaffordable from the start and were scheduled to expire in 2010. But to say so honestly, while the Republicans were promising to make them permanent for everybody, would probably have cost Mr Obama both elections.
So he made a Faustian bargain.
[...]
Mr Obama probably hoped that when the moment of truth arrived, when the spending cuts started to bite, the American people would support higher taxes rather than the spending cuts long called for in his own budget proposals. And perhaps they will still do so. Yet he has never presented an alternative with more robust tax revenues in order to fund a higher sustained level of public investments and services.
So now the moment of truth has arrived: we are on the path of deep cuts in discretionary programmes relative to national income. The truth is that America needs higher public investments and it needs more tax revenues to fund them. Mr Obama is finally saying some of these things, though still without specific tax proposals.
Yet it is very late in the day. Now that the Bush tax cuts are permanent, Mr Obama lacks the political leverage to achieve a boost of revenues. After years of deflecting public attention from the coming budget squeeze, he will now preside over sharp cuts in public services and investments that are the opposite of his stated goals.
This is the story Woodward is referring to.
Obama Sequester Warning: Carriers Will Sit Idle When They Should Deploy to Persian Gulf
The president planned to appear Tuesday at Virginia’s largest industrial employer, Newport News Shipbuilding, which would be affected by cuts to naval spending. Obama warned Monday that if the so-called sequester goes into effect later this week, the company’s “workers will sit idle when they should be repairing ships, and a carrier sits idle when it should be deploying to the Persian Gulf.”
[...]
Obama urged Congress to compromise to avoid the cuts, but there has been no indication the White House and congressional Republicans are actively negotiating a deal. The last known conversation between Obama and GOP leaders was last week, and there have been no in-person meetings between the parties this year.
Obama wants to replace the sequester with a package of targeted cuts and tax increases, while Republican leaders insist the savings should come from reduced spending alone.
Oh brother. The Republicans are saying it's a threat to national security. Ridiculous. But then the White House hurries in and says they didn't do it. Since the president has been doing all kinds of things to show how the budget cuts are going to cause big problems, it becomes hard to believe that they knew nothing about this move.
White House Says It Was Not Involved in Detainee Release
President Obama’s spokesman said Wednesday that the White House was not involved in the plan to release hundreds of immigrants from detention centers around the country over the past several days.
The decision, he said, was made by "career officials” at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an arm of the Department of Homeland Security, “without any input from the White House.”
Immigration officials have tied the mass releases, which began last week and came to light this week, to the looming budget cuts known as sequestration. The move has been welcomed by immigrants’ advocates but criticized by many Republican lawmakers who say it jeopardizes public safety.
WaPo reports that there will be a negotiation meeting, but not until the very last minute, on Friday. This is a hot political mess. Meanwhile, some polls how that the public doesn't know much about the sequester and is not reacting to it. That might change after the White House efforts during the past few days. But it also might mean outrage fatigue after years of flooding the media with debt/deficit propaganda.
Obama to meet with congressional leaders on ways to avoid sequester
In a meeting planned for Friday, President Obama will push Republican congressional leaders to accept higher tax revenue in order to avoid deep spending cuts set to take effect on the same day.
The Republicans are expected to reply that they already compromised at the beginning of the year, when they agreed to more than $600 billion in new taxes, according to officials in both camps.
The first formal meeting between Obama and congressional leaders over the spending cuts, known as the sequester, will come after weeks of finger-pointing by both sides. An administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the president will push for specific solutions from Republicans, asking them to name one tax break they are willing to end to stop the spending cuts.
[...]
The Senate plans to vote Thursday afternoon on replacing the sequester in part with tax increases on millionaires. The Democratic bill is expected to fail, as is a GOP alternative that would give the White House more flexibility to decide where the cuts would fall.
[...]
As part of belt-tightening prompted by the cuts, Boehner is curbing congressional trips abroad. [...]
As part of Obama’s efforts to put pressure on congressional Republicans, Organizing for Action, a nonprofit established to promote his second-term agenda, contacted people on its mailing list with a warning: “Prepare yourself for job layoffs, reduced access to early education, slower emergency response, slashed health care, and more people living on the street.”
Fiscal Ultimatum Fatigue
During the last several years the American people have become increasingly familiar with this kind of government blackmail, where the politicians tell us that if they cannot make a deal, one kind of fiscal calamity or another will hit the country. Congress seems to no longer debate spending or propose budgets, but rather they lurch from one spending related crisis to another, each with more dire consequences. Debt ceilings, defaults and sequesters have replaced rational, or even irrational, discourse about how to raise and spend that revenue.
[...]
The result of this is that many Americans are losing faith that the government is able or interested in doing anything about the budget or about creating a financial plan for the country. The threats, inevitably, are less meaningful over time as people grow accustomed to this pattern. Right now, few people outside of Washington care about the sequester because most of them, and us, think that the crisis will be averted at the last minute and replaced by a new one in a few months; and they, and we, are probably right.
This story is just so rich. The Dept. of Injustice strikes again.
DOJ: Dismiss Suit Over Supreme Court Visitor's 'Occupy Everywhere' Jacket
Fitzgerald Scott was viewing exhibits inside the U.S. Supreme Court last year when a police officer confronted him and demanded he remove his jacket.
Painted on the jacket were these words: "Occupy Everywhere." The deputy chief of the Supreme Court Police, Timothy Dolan, told Scott to take off the jacket or leave the building. Scott, according to Dolan, was violating the law that restricts expression inside the high court: no signs and no demonstrations.
Dolan, according to prosecutors, warned Scott he'd be arrested if he didn't comply. Scott was charged, under District of Columbia law, with unlawful entry. (He wasn't booked on the federal law that prohibits certain expressive activity inside the Supreme Court building.) Prosecutors, however, later abandoned the case. Scott filed suit in Washington federal district court.
This afternoon, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia asked a federal judge in Washington to dismiss Scott's case, which claims the authorities had no basis to make an arrest. The complaint also said the jacket's "pure speech" was protected under the First Amendment.
"The Government Wants To Bust Pre-Crime". Alyona on HuffPost Live. If the video won't embed, you can use the link. Pre-crime in these United States -- it's hard not to think of the drone strikes in other countries, also based on pre-crime.
Feds Predict The Future
The big data revolution is inspiring our intelligence agencies to get more serious than ever about knowing what happens in the world, and in America, before it happens.
Blog Posts and Tweets of Interest
The Evening Blues - 2-27-13
A Dispatch From The Committee To End The Future
Never thought I would see the day
Occupy the SEC Sues Fed, SEC, OCC, CFTC, FDIC, Treasury Due To Failure To Implement Volcker Rule
John Roberts has always had it in for the Voting Rights Act
The Sequester: Bipartisan Craponomics at Its Worst
Southern Europe "faced with a societal explosion"
The Strange Game Theory of the Sequester
Emerson, Lake & Palmer - From The Beginning