The debate in Washington has now reached such a state of sheer absurdity that, during the same week in which a Presidential Debt Commission issues proposals on how to substantially cut the country's long-term debt, the President and the minority party are negotiating whether to raise the deficits by $700 billion over ten years so the wealthy can get tax breaks. While the city of Norfolk, Virginia has begun to devise plans to move numerous homes and other structures because global warming has caused the level of coastal Atlantic waters to increase significantly as far as flood levels are concerned, there is now no prospect for any meaningful plan to jointly address global warming and compete vigorously with countries such as China, Germany, Norway, Brazil or India to create jobs in green industries and lift Americans from unemployment. It is time for novel ideas; time to think outside of the box. See what we should do below the fold.
It is abundantly clear that President Obama neither has the inclination nor skill to deliver on the balance of his agenda upon which he campaigned. I say this as someone who made calls for and donated to the President and believed that we were very fortunate to have a thoughtful, hard-working and extremely intelligent, personable public servant take over the reins of government after the disastrous Bush years. The days he was elected and inaugurated were two of the great days of my life and our country's history. Going in, as a result of the difficult circumstances facing this country with two wars and a deep economic recession, I knew it would be hard to accomplish all or most of his agenda. He deserves much credit for his perseverance in getting health care reform passed. It has many drawbacks: concessions made early to drug makers undermined fairness to consumers, breached the President's campaign promise and will probably reduce the cost containment effect of the reform just as a lack of a public option and postponement of the due date on the taxing of high-end plans will.
In other areas, he has made some important progress: the appointment of 2 Supreme Court justices not partisan towards conservatives, reduction of troops in Iraq, SCHIP expansion, Equal Pay Act and extensions of unemployment benefits. Financial reform possesses some positive elements such as the exchange for previously-unregulated financial instruments like derivatives and the creation of a new consumer regulatory apparatus to be designed by Elizabeth Warren. It has its holes as well: chiefly exceptions to the Volcker rule which will permit future risks of a repeat of recent financial calamities. All in all he deserves great credit for the number of legislative achievements during his first two years although none are sufficient for the times in which we live.
But in view of the severity and depth of our country's myriad of problems, he is an abject failure. His failure to use the opportunity after the BP oil spill to galvanize the country behind a "Manhattan-like Project" for the development of renewable energies, his LBJ-like refusal to see that the lack of a reliable partner in Hamid Karzai renders the strategy in Afghanistan a very costly long-shot at best and the difficulty with which he has run into in order to gain passage of a relatively modest START treaty with Russia adequately proves he is losing power to effect change. Worse his myopic fetishism about bipartisanship has caused him to extraordinarily claim he was at fault for not reaching out to the GOP when it was actually his penchant for being overly accomodating that nearly derailed health care reform and undermined the stimulus package so that it effects were both too small to create enough jobs or to generate the kind of political momentum legislative victories historically produce.
During this week this trajectory reached a pathetic apex: while unemployed Americans in the millions waited to see if benefits would be extended, the day before the beginning of negotiations with Republicans, the President unilaterally, without having secured concessions first from the GOP, announced that he would freeze the salaries of non-military federal employees for two years. Regardless of the merits of this action, the failure to first garner a concession from the Republicans, particularly when he knew he needed to get unemployment benefits extended and that the Republicans wanted such a freeze and hence may bargain for it, represented a brazen disregard for the unemployed. All so he can prove he is so magnanimous to a group of political opponents who scoff at such magananimity and view it as a sign of weakness to be taken advantage of. This naivete and blind belief on his part that the basic elements of human nature were suspended upon his election makes him unsuitable to push the Democratic Party's agenda. As he is on the verge of breaking his possibly most central campaign promise and the most core principle of the contemporary Democratic party, the expiration of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, it is clear that this country is still heading in the same direction - if now worse - in which we were moving during the last decade. There is one novel way to shake up things in Washington.
Today we learned that the Obama administration may have interfered with the prosecutions in Spain of certain members of the Bush administration who encouraged the use of torture against terror suspects. Furthermore, from Wiki-leaks, it has also been reported that the administration has refused to allow for the extradition to Nigeria of Vice President Cheney to face a criminal indictment; i.e., refused to cooperate with a country whose reciprocal cooperation most certainly is necessary in the war against terrorism as last year's Christmas bomber episode indicates.
This provides a bizarre opportunity. We should lobby Democratic representatives such as Dennis Kucinich and other progressives to call for Obama's impeachment for breach of international treaty obligations. First they should call for investigations with a stated threat to commence impeachment proceedings if necessary. So far the Obama administration has completely taken progressives for granted repeatedly showing more concern for the prerogatives of his political opponents than his former supporters. Compare the speed with which the USDA canned Shirley Sherrod without cause to the length of time it took to get Professor Warren appointed. Perhaps with the threat of impeachment by the left, he will take our concerns more seriously.
The beauty of this idea is that the GOP will oppose impeachment on these grounds. They will not permit an investigation into Obama administration efforts to stop these overseas prosecutions by independent sovereign judiciaries for fearing of reminding the country of the abuses and crimes of the Bush administration. Democrats would finally gain a seat at the table.
Now I understand that the President and Senate Democrats have boxed themselves by not addressing the tax cut issues pre-election as they should have. It did not help them politically to postpone them. And now the START treaty and the benefits to the unemployed are being held hostage as a result of this political malpractice. Since the summer of the death panel hysteria, the momentum has been with those whom I call the regressives. (You may designate them in other ways.) Let's rely on a counterintuitive, novel approach to force the President to live up to his promise and - in the meantime - shed light on the transgressions and injustices of our recent history as any civilized society should. I know it sounds like a crazy idea but these times demand thinking outside the box.