President Obama

The Politics of Fear (February 19, 2009)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

I have heard this term bandied about a lot recently on CNN, blogs, and out of the mouths of other talking heads. “The politics of fear,” alludes to Obama’s supposed strategy of scaring us into taking the wrecked economy seriously. The theory put forth by the cynical is that President Obama takes advantage of the current climate of panic to push forward his left wing, Democratic agenda. Although I first heard the phrase from the nonpartisan, but always cranky Lou Dobbs, I smell the influence of Rush Limbaugh and his ilk in selling this concept to the people of America. So there we have it, “the politics of fear” takes its place as a catch phrase for 2009, much like “Main St./Wall St.,” “Joe the Plumber,” and “Yes, We Can” reflected the political atmosphere of 2008.

But here’s my problem with the accusations by some that the Obama adminstration is somehow working the paranoia of the average American to its advantage: if anything I don’t know if Obama’s message has been dire enough. Agreed that he definitely used forceful rhetoric to get the always inept Congress (and I lay the blame in a bipartisan manner) to act on a stimulus package. But what part of Obama’s address was untrue I’d like to know? The following are actual headlines encountered while perusing theNew York Times in the last two days. Now, the Times may lean to the left, but I doubt there are a lot of sane folks on the planet who would accuse it of yellow journalism:

  • Newly Poor Swell Lines at Food Banks Nationwide – As the recession continues, more people who are unused to asking for help are picking up free groceries.
  • Stocks Slip on Bank Uncertainty And Economic Woes
  • $275 Billion Plan Seeks to Address Housing Crisis
  • Wall Street Quietly Searches for Direction
  • Fed Offers Bleak Economic Outlook – The Federal Reserve cut its economic outlook for 2009 on Wednesday and warned that the United States economy would face an “unusually gradual and prolonged” period of recovery as the country struggles to climb out of a deep global downturn.

Now my dear readers, I must ask, since I am no economist, which of these stories are in any way fraudulent or based on opinion, rather than fact? Do those who assert a “politics of fear” honestly believe that there is some great conspiracy between Obama, the Fed and the media designed to convince us all that Doomsday is approaching, just so the Democrats can foist their agenda on us? This seems disinegnuous and self-protecting at best, delusional and dangerous at worst. We are a nation suffering in part because of our collective unwillingness to look toward the future, confront reality and address systemic problems. It seems to me that buying into the “politics of fear” is just another way to hang onto the status quo and avoid doing any real work. That was the Bush legacy, not the Obama motivation. Our new Prez is certainly not afraid to tackle issues, issues that in many cases should have been dealt with before I was born. I am grateful to Obama for taking these lame duck accusations on the chin and pushing forward.

I considered this topic because of what’s going on in my own home. My husband has been out of a job for almost two months. After weeks of sending out resumes, working his inside connections and lowering his expectations on what he’s willing to do for money, he finally got a hit from a small company in the Chicago suburbs. However this lead, like so many during these times, turned into a painful near miss this week, actually the day of his birthday (Tuesday). He got all the way to the offer round, and then was not selected. We are starting to eat into our savings, and all economic indicators point to no relief on the job market any time soon. This is taking a major toll on my hubby, a man who perhaps more than most, ties his self-worth to his career and earning power. When he hears Lou Dobbs, or any other pundit, accusing Obama of playing the “politics of fear” with his sobering messages about the State of our Union, it is all I can do to restrain him. In our experience, and those of our friends and acquaintances, the economic reports are usually lagging behind what we see and hear on the front lines. If anything, the situation is much worse than the wags are saying.

I am about to give up on 2009 entirely. We are approaching the end of the first quarter, and I (and Bill Clinton) do not believe we’ve hit bottom yet. It is only then we can begin to rise again. This puts me in the unique position of praying for a faster, rather than a slower crash.

If all of this mess was just a distorted view brought on by the “politics of fear,” I would think I would have woken up from this nightmare by now to find a gainfully employed husband, my 401k portfolio having recovered the 38% value I lost in 2008, and my sister able to sell her house and move her expanding family to a place with enough space for their kids to grow.

Republican Warhawks And Arms Lobby Unite To Undermine US On World Stage (December 24, 2014)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

us-gun-policy

President Obama has taken bold actions in the fourth quarter of 2014, including a shift in Cuban policy and a public condemnation of Sony Pictures Entertainment’s decision to pull controversial film The Interview. It’s been several weeks of determined administrative change and strong messaging after a disappointing midterm election, starting with a resolution to alter the country’s broken immigration laws within the limits of Executive power.

Despite the incoming threat of a 114th Congress that promises to be even less agreeable than its predecessor, it finally feels like a winning time to be a liberal. Standing on the right side of history with a leader who has nothing left to personally gain or lose lives up in some small way to the ideals of candidate Obama. By and large, it’s a happy holiday week for those of us who are tired of receiving kicked cans from the nation’s capital.

But there is much work to be done, at home and abroad, before we put real distance between ourselves and the stagnant at best, harmful at worst policies that have characterized most of this century to date. For every Dreamer who now has a legal shot at a future in America, there is climate change denial. With satisfaction over the dismissal of an outdated, counterproductive approach to Cuban relations, we must still endure an economic model built to reward the one percent at the expense of almost everyone else. And then there’s the issue that often feels most hopeless of all – guns and weapons.

President Obama has been clear in his advocacy of sensible gun reform at home, as well as balanced global demilitarization. After the heartbreaking events at Sandy Hook Elementary School two years ago, the POTUS said:

“These tragedies must end, and to end them, we must change. We will be told that the causes of such violence are complex, and it is true. No single law, no set of laws can eliminate evil from the world or prevent every senseless act of violence in our society. But that can’t be an excuse for inaction. Surely we can do better than this.”

And in a June 2013 effort to reduce nuclear arms in partnership with Russia, Obama observed: “I’ve determined that we can ensure the security of America and our allies, and maintain a strong and credible strategic deterrent, while reducing our deployed strategic nuclear weapons by up to one-third.”

Shamefully, the President has been totally lacking in Congressional partners who want to make the world’s streets safer with him. A late 2012 report from the Sunlight Foundationhighlighted the problem: “Just over half (51 percent) of the members of the new Congress…have received funding from the National Rifle Association’s political action committee at some point in their political careers..And 47 percent received money from the NRA in the most recent race in which they ran.”

There’s a lot that the leader of the free world can do without Capitol Hill, but he can’t ratify treaties designed to make the present and future of our planet a little more secure. Thus the BBC’s innocuous headline this week, Global Arms Trade Deal Takes Effect, masks an important detail. Around130 countries have signed the pact, but fewer than half of them have ratified it. The latter number includes the United States, which also happens to be the world’s top arms exporter.

This one ought to be a no-brainer. The treaty was written to limit the transfer of weapons to “warlords, human rights abusers, terrorists and criminal organizations.” Yet the BBC observes, “Washington signed the agreement in 2013, but now it requires approval by the Senate, where opposition is believed to be strong.” The same Senate of course, that will be controlled by the NRA-owned GOP come January.

In his new strategy of basically going it alone to give the people what they need, the President has been admirably steady. There’s reason to hope for more delayed common sense action in 2015. Public and civic agitation regarding the nation’s cynical and deadly deference to the gun lobby, and its money, ought to be high on the priority list.

113th Congress Produces 22% of “Do-Nothing” 1947-1948 Counterpart (December 20, 2014)

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Do-Nothing-Congress

Similar to overpaid NFL “star” Jay Cutler’s reign of terror as the starting quarterback for the Chicago Bears, the best thing we can say about the 113th session of Congress is that it’s over. Setting a new standard for lethargic mediocrity, the body, which formally adjourned this week, passed just 200 bills over the last two years. By comparison, the 80th session of 1947-1948, affectionately referred to as the “Do-Nothing Congress,” shepherded a whopping 900 pieces of legislation. Harry Truman’s clever branding of Washington’s stuffed shirts was accurate at the time, but seems quaintly innocent from the vantage point of late 2014.

In an Associated Press piece entitled, 113th Congress Ends With More Fights Than Feats, writer Alan Fram observes (somewhat poetically), “The tempestuous 113th Congress has limped out of Washington for the last time, capping two years of modest and infrequent legislating that was overshadowed by partisan clashes, gridlock and investigations.” Limp is right. What little paperwork did make it to the President’s desk did nothing to address the nation’s broken immigration system, declining infrastructure, archaic and biased tax code, unlivable minimum wage and a host of other dire issues rendering America less functional.

Of course, despite maintaining a despotic stranglehold on the House of Representatives, none of this should be blamed on the GOP. Just ask them:

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell: “How many times did we have the point of the week?… It was designed to make us walk the plank. It had nothing to do with getting a legislative outcome.”

Michael Steel, spokesman for House Majority Leader John Boehner: Republicans passed “jobs bill after jobs bill…But Washington Democrats — including President Obama and Senate Democratic leaders — have utterly failed to act.”

Moira Bagley Smith, spokeswoman for House Majority Whip Steve Scalise: “Considering the Senate is sitting on over 350 pieces of House-passed legislation from this Congress, I believe Senator Reid’s chamber single-handedly has earned the title of ‘least productive…’The contrast in productivity between these two chambers couldn’t be more obvious.”

Examples of these “350 pieces of House-passed legislation” include more than 50 votes designed to kill or weaken the nowclearly successful Affordable Care Act. And if you can’t recall the reported avalanche of awesome Republican jobs bills, you are not alone. Meanwhile in the Democratic-led Senate, legislation designed to raise the federal minimum wage, create equal pay for women, improve the student loan morass and extend jobless benefits for the long-term unemployed, proved DOA in the House.

So goodbye and good riddance 113th Congress, with your 15 percent approval rating. Better luck next year. Oh wait.

Per writer Aileen Graef of UPI, “When the 114th Congress enters its first session in January, it will be controlled by the Republican party which has already vowed to fight the White House on contentious issues including healthcare and immigration. With President Obama waiting to meet the new Congress ready to veto, it spells a grim future for productivity and approval ratings.”

As I suggested shortly after the November midterm elections, frustrated voters who thought they were sending President Obama and the Democrats a message at the ballot box (“Do something!”) were speaking to the wrong party. There’s no reason to believe that the 114th session will be any more productive than the last. Stonewalling has proven a GOP ballot box-winning strategy. Nothing will change until we demand it, and stop rewarding sandbaggers with additional terms in office.

The Congressional Budget Office Vs. Paul Ryan: Will the Nonpartisan Entity Stand Its Ground? (October 7, 2014)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

paul ryan

This past weekend, while broadcasting from the snazzy new studio of NBC’s Sunday stalwart, Meet the Press, freshman host Chuck Todd uttered a provocative statement/question directed at Dan Pfeiffer, senior advisor to President Obama. The dialogue centered on the Ebola crisis and the CDC’s preparedness to handle additional American cases that may develop. Todd sought to probe Pfeiffer about the government’s assurance of readiness, with references to other Obama administration scandals and missteps:

“I think one of your challenges though is a trust deficit that has been created over the last 18 months…it is a fact about all the different sort of government gaps over the last 18 months. Edward Snowden stealing NSA files, the VA faking wait times, IRS losing emails, healthcare.gov doesn’t launch.

The president himself saying, ‘U.S. intelligence agencies underestimated ISIS.’ The DHS, the border failure with that surge over the summer, sort of failure, and of course, the secret service. Why should we trust that what you’re saying about the CDC is able to handle this? You understand why there’s more skepticism than normal.”

While the relative applicability and fairness of the interrogation can be debated, Todd’s point about a broad crisis confidence in our leadership’s honesty, competency and proactivity is well-taken. To Todd’s list I might add that an overtly political, conservatively activist SCOTUS has also led to “more skepticism than normal” when it comes to independent truth. There are very few nonpartisan, unbiased institutions left to us.

But we always have the Congressional Budget Office. Or do we? Per its website, the CBO describes its mission as follows:

“Since its founding in 1974, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has produced independent analyses of budgetary and economic issues to support the Congressional budget process. The agency is strictly nonpartisan and conducts objective, impartial analysis, which is evident in each of the dozens of reports and hundreds of cost estimates that its economists and policy analysts produce each year. All CBO employees are appointed solely on the basis of professional competence, without regard to political affiliation. CBO does not make policy recommendations, and each report and cost estimate discloses the agency’s assumptions and methodologies.”

For 30 years, American citizens have been able to enjoy the uninterrupted luxury of taking CBO data at face value, without having to search for a hidden agenda. It’s been quaint and refreshing. However, if he has his way, Wisconsin Congressman House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan will deprive voters of one of its last cynicism-free zones. In his column “Voodoo Economics, the Next Generation,” Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman writes:

“[Ryan] is dropping broad hints that after the election he and his colleagues will do what the Bushies never did, try to push the budget office into adopting ‘dynamic scoring,’ that is, assuming a big economic payoff from tax cuts.

So why is this happening now? It’s not because voodoo economics has become any more credible.”

Note the transition from former President Bill Clinton’s late 1990s surplus, to Dubya’s early aughts budget crater, should have been enough to teach us all that tax cuts do not, after all, pay for themselves. When money is returned to the already wealthy, they don’t invest in human capital and infrastructure projects. They buy things and hoard cash as the deficit balloons.

But nevertheless, as Krugman continues:

“Voodoo economics has dominated the conservative movement for so long that it has become an inward-looking cult, whose members know what they know and are impervious to contrary evidence…

[And] Second, the nature of the budget debate means that Republican leaders need to believe in the ways of magic.”

Well, the GOP establishment has the freedom to pursue any convoluted agenda it likes. They can continue to play Jedi Mind Tricks on the mass media and members of the party’s fervent base. But the CBO doesn’t have to play co-conspirator, and moreover, it musn’t.

One need not be an economist with a PhD to understand that large-scale tax cuts carry a cost ($3.5 trillion to extend all of the Bush cuts, except the estate and gift tax reductions, through 2020), not an economic return. Does the CBO have the pride and determination to weather the post-midterm election political pressure from the right? If not, I have to agree with Krugman that, “It would destroy the credibility of a very important institution, one that has served the country well.”

Last week we watched a once vaunted institution, the Secret Service, crumble under the weight of scandal and mismanagement. And it’s been years since the basic functions of Congress ground to a halt as the result of partisan obstruction. The CBO must protect its impartiality, not for the sake of any Republican or Democratic agenda, but for the people. Let’s do something really revolutionary. Let’s win one for common sense.

Republican Ideology Has Its Worst Week Ever (July 20, 2014)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

lets_talk_ideology

Though you’d never guess by listening to its representatives speak, it was a terrible week for modern Republican ideology.

Those right-wingers who love to call President Obama weak on foreign policy, setting him in relief against their favorite bare-chested strongman Vladimir Putin, are scrambling to crawl under the nearest rock. It’s becoming increasingly apparent that the icon of conservative male virility lent support to war criminals who shot 80 children from the sky. Per a report from theAssociated Press:

“On Thursday, Putin blamed Ukraine for the crash, saying Kiev was responsible for the unrest in its Russian-speaking eastern regions. But he didn’t accuse Ukraine of shooting the plane down and didn’t address the key question of whether Russia gave the rebels such a powerful missile.”

If gathering rumors are to be believed, Russian interlopers may have already absconded to Moscow with Malaysian Airlines Flight 17’s “black box” recorder. And as of Saturday morning, the crash site in Eastern Ukraine remains unsecured. As evidence decays and/or is purposefully tampered with, Putin’s Thursday statement may be the closest thing we ever get to an admission of the truth. A wise person once told me that when an unpleasant man tells you something about himself, believe him. And by shying away from implausible deniability (a sport in which the Russian thug routinely indulges), Putin is speaking loud and clear.

Russian sponsorship of the downing of the defenseless civilian airliners. Yeah, that’s real bravery. Keep talking McCain Nation.

Moving onto another human tragedy a little closer to home, the Republican Party continued its parade of heartless, xenophobic double talk about the Central American child immigrant crisis. Even as Colorado’s Democratic Governor John Hickenlooper offered a ray of humanitarian hope in writing, “If Denver or other communities in Colorado want to offer their support and sponsorship while these children are in the legal system, the state respects and would defend that decision,” and Pope Francis publicly cautioned the devout to love and protect the kids, a dark strain of ugliness continued to permeate the official GOP response.

This past week, retired medical doctor and Republican House member Phil Gingrey told NBC News, “The border patrol gave us a list of the diseases that they’re concerned about, and Ebola was one of those…I can’t tell you specifically that there were any cases of Ebola, I don’t think there were, but of course Tuberculosis, Chagas disease, many – small pox, some of the infectious diseases of children, all of these are concerns.”

These alarmist and disgusting comments continue to undercut our nation’s once-vaunted reputation as a refuge for freedom seekers. On a secondary level, you have to wonder if the GOP understands that they won’t be able to erase Hispanic voter memory in 2014 and beyond. Yet the certainty that the party is briskly digging its own electoral grave doesn’t do much to relieve the dire and fearful predicament of the kids. They’ve run from terror only to be treated as enemy invaders by the Land of the Free.

This year has been unbelievably tough for those in favor of contemplative, deliberate foreign policy, sensible gun and comprehensive immigration reforms and last but not least, liberty for the GOP’s most discounted “special interest group” – women.

New York Times commentator Timothy Egan makes the case this week that the SCOTUS’ disastrous Hobby Lobby decision does more than assault female reproductive freedom. It also takes a swipe at our founding principle – the separation of church and state. He writes, “In the United States, God is on the currency. By brilliant design, though, he is not mentioned in the Constitution. The founders were explicit: This country would never formally align God with one political party, or allow someone to use religion to ignore civil laws. At least that was the intent. In this summer of the violent God, five justices on the Supreme Court seem to feel otherwise.”

As Americans continue to grapple with the Supreme Court’s increasingly partisan suppression of human rights in favor of corporate ones, the media is finally (finally!) beginning to take the five Catholic male justices responsible to task in a semi-bipartisan way. Meanwhile, Democratic Congressional leaders are trying to develop and pass legislation that would grant women access to everything promised by the Affordable Care Act. May they be relentless.

It was a week when modern Republican claims to be defenders of freedom, limited government and human dignity were clearly exposed as money and power grabbing, racist scams. Individual rights trump all else – except for women who want to make their own family planning decisions. Give us your tired and your poor – unless they are frightened brown children. We have no money to take care of them properly as dictated by law. Those funds are subsidizing the lifestyles and business ventures of the one percent. And that weak-willed, effeminate Obama. If only he’d man up and covertly supply terrorists who murder international civilians like that macho Vladimir Putin.