The Occupy Wall Street Movement that started in September with about 1,000 persons in New York City grew by leaps and spread all across the nation--including her in Iowa City. The growing city movements have lists of concerns and demands that cannot be ignored or trivialized. Their demands are simple and their grievances are legitimate.
From Washington to Wall Street and beyond, our representatives across the nation have failed to work together to help our country move away from this significant economic stalemate. Each party blames the other. It appears that all our respected senators and Congressional representatives want to do is to keep their fat checks and high-quality health insurance coverage while one in six Americans is starving and living in poverty. Economic justice is absent in today's America. ...
It is time for all Americans from all walks of life t put pressure on their representatives in Washington and in their respective states to start working for us not against us. Creating jobs, supporting education and ensuring we all have adequate and affordable healthcare must be center stage.
We all must stand united against corporate greed, again mass lobbying by the rich and powerful and against the dysfunction in the U.S. Congress.
Shams Ghoneim, "Long pass time to address poverty, economic justice," Iowa City Press-Citizen
Jeremiah 8:15
November 22, 2011
Young voters might not be familiar with the government of the year 2000 — at least not by its balance sheet. The economy: booming. Tax revenue: rolling in. Expenses for war: none. And to top it off, there was a $200 billion surplus.
Congress was already spending more money than it was taking in. Cutting taxes again would make that worse.
The Bush administration appeared to be on the brink of invading Iraq — a second war to fund.
Support for it in the Senate was so weak, Republican leaders had to use an arcane budget process to push it through. But that meant the cuts had to have a lower price tag, so the Bush administration made the cuts sunset — in other words, they would expire later in the decade. It appeared as though the cuts would cost the Treasury some $350 billion.
And if there was any doubt about Republican plans for the cuts, President Bush made them clear in his next State of the Union address: "What Congress has given, the Congress should not take away — for the sake of job growth, the tax cuts you passed should be permanent." http://www.npr.org/2011/11/22/142641756/did-bush-tax-cuts-foreshadow-supercommittes-failure
ON POINT RADIO
Jacki Lyden in for Tom Ashbrook
Super-failure for the Super Committee. Now what?
From left, Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., Rep. Xavier Becerra, D-Calif., and Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction attend the panel's last public hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, Nov. 1, 2011. The congressional super committee is trying to come up with a package by Thanksgiving that trims the federal deficit by at least $1.2 trillion over 10 years. (AP)
Many Americans didn’t pay much attention to the Super Committee or its goals – until it admitted defeat. The failure of political consensus in the 112th Congress on reaching agreement about how to reduce the nation’s deficit will get attention henceforth though, as an ‘automatic’ buzz saw of 1.2 trillion in cuts begins to whir through everything from the Pentagon to food safety.
What will be fallout for the president? For Congress? For the American People?
This hour, On Point, the Super Committee’s ‘Greek tragedy that could have us looking a lot more like Greece.
-Jacki Lyden
Guests
John Harwood, Chief Washington Correspondent, CNBC. Political writer for the New York Times.
Alex Brill, a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
Tim Dickinson, is a political correspondent for Rolling Stone magazine and author of Rollingstone.com’s political blog, National Affairs Daily. His November 9th article for the magazine was, “How the GOP Became the Party of the Rich”
From The Reading List
Rolling Stone “Today’s Republican Party may revere Reagan as the patron saint of low taxation. But the party of Reagan – which understood that higher taxes on the rich are sometimes required to cure ruinous deficits – is dead and gone. Instead, the modern GOP has undergone a radical transformation, reorganizing itself around a grotesque proposition: that the wealthy should grow wealthier still, whatever the consequences for the rest of us.”
Wall Street Journal “Now that the committee has apparently failed, lawmakers and others are taking a harder look at the automatic cuts, or “sequester,” which will kick in starting January 2013 unless Congress acts. And they look plenty scary.”
Slate “For starters, the whole premise of the Supercommittee was that if it didn’t agree on something, then $1.2 trillion of spending cuts would be quasi-automatically implemented through a mechanism known as “sequestration.” The cuts are balanced 50-50 between the security and nonsecurity sides of the budget.”
AT LAST A VICTORY FOR PROGRESSIVE
E. J. Dionne
E. J. Dionne in They Only Look Dead: Why Progressives Will Dominate the Next Politcal Era (1996), unknowingly at the time is supporting the Occupy Movement. He writes that the United States has fallen into a politics of accusation in which the moral annihilation of opponents is the ultimate goal. It is now no longer enough simply to defeat, out-argue or outpoll a foe. Now, the only test of victory is whether an adversary’s moral standing is thoroughly shredded and destroyed. A political rival or philosophical adversary cannot be simply mistaken, foolish, impractical or wrongheaded. He or she has to be made into the moral equivalent of Hitler or Stalin, the marquis de Sade or Al Capone.
Would Romney's Tough China Talk Survive Election?
November 22, 2011
Within the Republican presidential field, no one has talked tougher about China than Mitt Romney. He has vowed to go after that country from his first day in office, threatening to slap tariffs on Chinese imports to make up for its artificially low currency.
"We can't just sit back and let China run all over us," Romney said. "People say, 'Well, you'll start a trade war.' There's one going on right now, folks. They're stealing our jobs. And we're going to stand up to China." http://www.npr.org/2011/11/22/142606484/would-romney-s-tough-china-talk-survive-election
This trend [of damning thy opponent to hell] especially hurt Bill Clinton, but it did not start with him. On the contrary, conservative Clinton bashers were motivated in part by a desire to avenge the wrong done to their own heroes. Democrats had been happy to engage in moral annihilation when it suited their purposes: against Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas, Elliott Abrams and Ed Meese. “Remember Clarence Thomas!” has now assumed the same power on the right as “Remember Madrid!” did for anti-fascist veterans of the Spanish civil war. The result, across the spectrum, is a political war of all against all.
Dionne writes that the late Senator Sam Ervin of Watergate fame once offered some sound advice for lawyers facing difficult cases. If the law is against you, he said, pound the evidence. If the evidence is against you, pound the law. And if they’re both against you, pound the table.
Politicians have come up with their own version of Ervin’s law: When you cannot satisfactorily explain your positions or offer solutions, pound one another. Politicians are the people with the most to lose from today’s accusatory political climate. Yet paradoxically, they play the largest role in creating it. The personal attacks routinely used in political advertising are the most obvious manifestations of the politics of moral annihilation.
Politicians rightly sense the depth of the public’s disenchantment and yet also know the difficulty of selling solutions that might unsettle the status quo. As an alternative, they have transformed campaigns and the policy debate itself into an exercise in continuing invective. If you know the public is so mad that it will discount your proposed solutions, your best tactic is to denounce what the other guy is suggesting—and, of course, the other guy himself.
DESTROYING DEMOCRACY IN THE NAME OF CHOICE
In the heat of the 1994 health care debate, the Republican National Committee aired a series of television commercials that pretended to be compassionate, but in the end, killed the health care bill in the name of “big government, and won the election of 1994. However, Dionne writes that this win was a two-edge sword.
Dionne posits that unintentionally to be sure, pointed to a fundamental problem confronting the Republicans in the 1990s: they can, indeed, win cheers and votes by talking against “big government.” Americans, as we have seen, have become deeply skeptical about whether government can solve the problems that worry them—whether it’s capable of doing anything right. But Americans also continue to wish that government might be effective and fix a social contract they sense to be broken.
Republicans have to concede now and again that the federal government may have to do some things. In the health care ad, Republican Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi insisted that to help those worried about losing health insurance, “Congress simply needs to change the law so you can change jobs and keep continuous coverage.” When you think about it, that’s a breathtaking promise from the party of free markets and a small federal government: Congress will solve your health insurance problems with a law passed in Washington. So spoke the anti-government Republicans! (151-2)
REPUBLICANS WANT TO BE LEFT ALONE TO PLUNDER THE SYSTEM
Republicans in the late 1990s, similar to the present, could not afford to ignore the cultural issues and risk alienating the Christian conservatives, perhaps the most important grassroots force in their party. The new strategists, led by William Kristol [Head of the Project for a New American Century, which lay at the heart of bankrupting the US with its overreach the eventually brought Obama to office], Bill Schambra and Michael Joyce, therefore proposed a return to one of the core principles of the original conservative revival in the 1940s and 1950s: the use of libertarian means to traditional ends.
Rather than urge massive new forms of government intervention on behalf of conservative values, these neo-Reaganites suggested that the best thing that could be done for traditional ideas and institutions was to tear down federal programs and union-dominated city bureaucracies. These they accused of fostering permissive attitudes, dependency, family breakup and all manner of other evils.
Their program included shipping welfare (and as many other assistance programs as possible) back to the states. It suggested educational voucher programs to break up the big-city public school systems. It proposed that local governments and school systems be given more leeway to promote values, including religious values, to whatever extent local citizens thought appropriate. As a short-term tactic, this approach worked brilliantly, submerging fundamental differences within the Republican electorate.
Anti-tax, anti-government conservatives could embrace the agenda without fearing that the religious right was about to impose its worldview through the powers of the federal government. The harder-edged far right opposed to all forms of gun control, federal environmental regulation and virtually anything else Washington did could also identify with this approach. The religious right, in the meantime, was more than happy to rally to a critique of liberal, big-government “permissiveness.” Republicans formed what conservative activist Grover Norquist called the “leave us alone” coalition. (156)
Grover Norquist on the Next Republicanism from New America Foundation on FORA.tv
REPUBLICAN CALVINISMRepublican conservatism in 195 was concerned with cutting any social programs including health care reform for the poor. Dionne writes that despite problems in the Republican budgets—the House budget cut taxes while, in classic 1980s fashion, postponing the hardest spending cuts to the end of the seven-year period—there was boldness here absent from either the Reagan or Bush programs. In the mid-1990s the Republicans seemed intent finally on proving Reagan’s claim that if the government’s “allowance” were cut off through tax cuts, smaller government would inevitably follow.
But in taking the deficit plunge, the Republicans effectively admitted that much of what they had said in the 1980s was wrong: that it was not possible to cut taxes, maintain popular federal programs and balance the budget all at the same time. They forced themselves to face up to decisions they had largely postponed for fifteen years. In important ways, they radicalized conservatism. In so doing, they pushed the country toward decisive choices over how to deal with the four crises in American politics and how to weather the great economic transformation. (158)
FUSIONSIM OF 20TH CENTURY CONSERVATISM ENTER 21ST CENTURY POLITCS
Dionne write that the conservatism that came to dominate the Republican Party in the Reagan era and after was a amalgam of ideas, a brilliant philosophical cut-and-paste job aimed at satisfying the various groups that might come together to produce a national majority. After World War II two sets of ideas emerged that came to be known as conservative. On the one side was traditionalism, rooted in an old-fashioned reverence for family, neighborhood, the values passed on through generations. This conservatism was pessimistic, or perhaps realistic, about human nature. It was, in any event, without illusions about the destruction human beings could unleash absent the guidance of religion and the constraints imposed by families and communities.
Traditionalist were critical of modern liberalism because of what they saw as liberalism’s veneration of the national state over localism, its excessive optimism about human nature and its willingness to let social experimentation run roughshod over settled values. But traditionalist did not alone revere the market and could be critical of its workings. Markets did not create values, virtue or social order.
“Not many conservatives would be happy to enlist under the banner of one abstraction, Capitalism, against another abstraction, Communism,” declared the traditionalist Russell Kirk, “or to die absurdly for ‘a higher standard of living.’” For traditionalists, those conservatives who said that adults should be free to trade pornography or vile videotapes in the open marketplace could not be genuine conservatives. They did not value the truly important things.
The other school of conservatism that rose after the war made the contrary assertion. These libertarian conservatives were animated less by worries over destruction of old values than by a fear of the overweening modern state. For these libertarians, the market was everything, or almost everything. Some on the right might defend the welfare state as a stabilizing and thus a conservatizing force, but the libertarians would have none of it. For them, the welfare state was simply the early stage of a process that would lead inexorably to the Leviathan of Hitler or Stalin.
The surrender of some power to the state in the interest of winning a bit of security was, in the libertarian’s view, just the first of many such surrenders. Friedrich von Hayek, the great prophet of modern libertarianism, argued that when democracies attempted central economic planning, they were taking the first step down the terrible path toward totalitarianism. Planning inevitably centralized power in the hands of a small group claiming special powers based on alleged expertise. For the libertarians, not reverence for tradition but the rights of the individual occupied the hollowed place in politics. (158-9)
POLITICAL SPECTERS FROM THE 20TH CENTURY MOVE INTO THE 21ST
In the 20th, the new Republicans pushed by Newt Gingrich the Republicans began to dismantle the institutions bequeathed them by the Progressive and New Deal eras. At first the Republicans felt anxiety at tampering with welfare, food stamps, Medicare and other basic components of the social safety net. There was much deregulatory rhetoric, and the regulatory agencies were led by administrators with more sympatric view to business, but for all that, the necessity of government intervention, especially on behalf of the environment, the elderly and the poor, was broadly accepted. The deficit itself stood as testimony to conservative reluctance to take on a task of a radical dismantling of the federal government.
This was also part of the neo-Reaganite synthesis put forward by Bill Kristol, Bill Schambra and [what has become popularly known as the Neocons/Neoconservatives]. The revolt against Progressivism is [even in the late 1990s], becoming the dominant political project of the Republican Party. It is the central argument of Dionne’s They Only Look Dead that this attack, far from routing Progressivism, is a precursor of its renewal. For [over] two decades, Progressives have been timid in defending their project, and distracted by cultural politics.
The [so-called] Gingrich Revolution gives them no choice but to battle to preserve Progressivism’s achievements and renew its program. And as support for the Republican Congress dropped in the autumn of 1995, it became clear many voters were, indeed, looking for more from government than Gingrich wanted to offer. By moving American conservatism toward a rendezvous with nineteenth century laissez-faire doctrines, Gingrich and his [Republican] allies [running as candidates running in 2012] will force their opponents to grapple with the task of constructing the twenty-first-century alternatives to laissez-faire.
WHY AMERICANS HATE THE PRESS & THE MEDIA
Dionne posits that the classic machine politicians’ definition of a public official’s “political base” is “the people who are with you when you’re wrong.” By that definition, the press is rapidly losing its base. Increasingly, all sides in the political debate are ready to stand against the press. Few outside journalism support reporters in times of controversy, and reporters themselves have emerged as their own profession’s fiercest critics.
The unpopularity of the news, gossip and opinion businesses can be measured by the lumping together of the entire enterprise under what has become an epithet, “the media.” That term is used to cover everything from the major newspapers to the evening news shows to Rush Limbaugh and Oprah and Hard Copy. The proposition that “the media” are complicit in the public’s disenchantment with politics and its cynicism about democratic government is so widely accepted that it is barely debated. (231)
Dionne writes that the problems of the media are systematic. They are not merely the result of technological change or new fads, although both obviously play an important role. In a literal sense we journalist no longer know what we’re doing; there is no consensus on what the goals of journalism really are, nor is there agreement as to whom or to what we are obligated. I speak here especially of political journalism, broadly defined to include not just the coverage of elections but also reporting on major public issues and controversies. (236)
In broad terms, the media need to help Americans recover what Christopher Lashch called “the lost art of argument.” Journalism has to do far better than it does now in demonstrating the connections among facts, arguments and political action. Journalism was right to delve into what was going on behind “the media events.” But simply demonstrating that manipulation happens and describing how the process works does nothing to advance the political debate. Journalism’s task now is to look not just behind “the spin,” but also behind the public arguments put forward by politicians. It is not enough to report them and “fact check” for errors.
What really matters to citizens are the underlying assumptions and goals of those putting forward various positions. And there also needs to be so much more attention paid to whether a given policy would actually solve the problem it is addressing. Most citizens care more about solving problems than about abstract policy. What is needed is what might be called an investigative reporting of ideas. Its purpose would be to take what politicians actually say and do very seriously—to report more fully than is now the rule on the words as well as the actions of politicians, and then to look more carefully at the underlying implications of their ideas and proposals.
What is true of a style of history well described by Robert Wiebe should also be true of journalism: that it should be “situated at the intersection between beliefs and actions.” It’s important to examine carefully not only what politicians say and do, but also what they say. The point of such journalism would be to make clear that the words and actions within the political realm matter, and to take seriously the ability of average citizens to sort out which words and actions matter most. (257-8)
THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00lmvyl#synopsis
25/11/2011
Media :
Availability:
7 days left to listen
Last broadcast today, 20:05 on BBC World Service (see all broadcasts).
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Synopsis
'Another Great Depression is all but inevitable’ - that's the view of Steve Keen. No wonder he's been called the ‘Merchant of Gloom’.
But then Keen is one of the few economists to have predicted the global financial crisis.
And while he used to be a lone voice challenging the economic consensus, more and more people are now listening to him.
His way of avoiding depression? Write off the debt, bankrupt the banks, nationalize the financial system, and start all over again.
The Long, Slow March Toward Supercommittee's Crisis
November 22, 2011
Lawmakers have spent much of this year struggling to reach a deal that could get budget deficits under control. But the problem has been developing for at least a decade.
Young voters might not be familiar with the government of the year 2000 — at least not by its balance sheet. The economy: booming. Tax revenue: rolling in. Expenses for war: none. And to top it off, there was a $200 billion surplus.
"We had Allen Greenspan, the chairman of the Fed, openly fretting that we would pay down all of our debt and that could lead to terrible economic consequences," said Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.
But a lot happened in the first two years of George W. Bush's presidency. He said his first order of business was giving back the surplus by cutting taxes. Then came the Sept. 11 attacks, the war in Afghanistan and a spike in government spending on domestic security.
http://www.npr.org/2011/11/22/142641756/did-bush-tax-cuts-foreshadow-supercommittes-failure
http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/wbnews
Egypt Chaos 22 Nov 11
Tue, 22 Nov 11
Duration: 28 mins
Available: 30 days remaining
Egypt's latest political crisis is fast turning into an economic crisis too. World Business Report looks at how the protests against military rule in Cairo have caused panic selling among investors. We'll hear from Egyptian businesses who want an end to corruption. Also, as Brussels prepares to unveil its big idea for easing the debt crisis, we hear why some people believe it offers nothing more than a "sweet poison".
Wall Street Update 21 Nov 11
Mon, 21 Nov 11
Duration: 7 mins
Available: 30 days remaining
The failure of a congressional committee to reach a decision on US budget cuts has cast a shadow over markets in Wall Street and Europe. Chris Low from FTN Financial in New York tells us, the inability of politicians in Washington to compromise is starting to bother investors. And what do people in Asia make of the US and European debt problems, our reporter in Hong Kong gives us his take.
US debt debacle 21 Nov 11
Mon, 21 Nov 11
Duration: 28 mins
Available: 29 days remaining
Politicians in the United States have failed to reach agreement on how to cut the massive American budget deficit. We'll hear what that might mean for the American people. Iran's economic isolation deepens as the US, Britain and Canada sever all financial ties over the Iranian nuclear programme. And why Hungary is appealing for help from the international lender of last resort, the IMF.
Latest Egyptian Clashes Wound Nearly 2,000
November 22, 2011
As Egyptian protesters continue battles with police and troops in Cairo, the casualty figures are rising steadily. Many of the wounded are being treated in makeshift clinics on Tahrir Square. Protestors say they will not stop until they've driven the ruling military council from power as they did Hosni Mubarak in February.
Military Blocks Egypt's Path To Democracy
November 22, 2011
The latest round of Egyptian protests began when the military tried to strengthen its power in any future government. Vali Nasr of Tufts University talks to Steve Inskeep about other armies that tried to gain a bigger role in a supposedly democratic country. Nasr is also the author of The Rise of Islamic Capitalism, and is a former advisor to the Obama administration.
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