In an essay at Huffington Post, “Progressives and the Deficit,” Robert Creamer warns, “It would be easy for Progressives to fumble the growing debate on the federal deficit.”

He writes, “Austerity for seniors, cuts in education spending, reductions in spending on infrastructure — these are not long term solutions to America’s fiscal woes. They will make matters worse.”

Creamer gives six rules for how Progressives should approach the issue of the deficit:

1. Progressives should make it completely clear that we share the view that long-term deficits must be brought under control — the real question is how. There are a number of fiscal glide paths that reduce federal deficits over the long run.
2. We must insist that each of the alternative paths to reduce the deficit be evaluated using one key measure: How will it affect our success at creating widely shared economic growth?
3. In the short term — in order to dig our way out of the economic catastrophe that Bush and his friends on Wall Street left us — America needs more spending on jobs and economic growth. We need an expansionary economic policy now in order to jumpstart long-term growth for the future. …. The Great Depression did not really finally end until Emperor Hirohito’s bombing of Pearl Harbor gave American politicians the will to spend at levels that had previously been unheard in order win World War II.
4. The current push by Wall Street fiscal hawks to cut the long-term deficit by reducing payments to retirees on Social Security, or cutting back on critical programs like education, don’t meet that test.  …  Cutting Social Security payments does nothing but diminish the wide distribution of income that is essential to sustain long-term growth. … In 1969, the U.S. per capita Gross Domestic Product (our nation’s output of goods and services per person) was $20,994. Adjusted for inflation it had more than doubled by 2009 to $41,646. … The problem is that the wealthiest people in America have kept a substantial portion of that income gain for themselves.
5. We must always insist that whatever economic path is taken to assure long-term fiscal soundness in the future meets the test — will it stimulate widely shared long-term economic growth? To assure we meet this test, we must eliminate the confusion between investment and consumption in our federal budget. … It has to change if there is to be a political incentive to spend more federal dollars on investment in future economic growth.
6. Stay on the offensive. … The Pete Peterson’s of the world have geared up to use the new Presidential Fiscal Commission as a soapbox to promote their pro-Wall Street views that attempt to paint “greedy seniors” and out of control “entitlements” as the villains of the fiscal drama. We can’t cede any ground on this issue.

Creamer writes, “The tiny plutocracy that sopped up most of our economic growth for the last decade and gambled recklessly on Wall Street are the true villains of the piece. They are the same people who insisted on the massive Bush tax cuts for the rich and a tax code where hedge fund managers who literally make hundreds of millions of dollars each year pay taxes at a lower rate than the janitors who sweep their floors.”

Written by Mike Bock

Interesting article in The Smirking Chimp, by Norman Solomon, urges progressives to oppose President Obama’s nomination of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court arguing that, if confimed, Kagan, “will move the Supreme Court to the right.”

Solomon quotes University of Illinois law professor Francis Boyle: “During the course of her Senate confirmation hearings as Solicitor General, Kagan explicitly endorsed the Bush administration’s bogus category of ‘enemy combatant,’ whose implementation has been a war crime in its own right. Now, in her current job as U.S. Solicitor General, Kagan is quarterbacking the continuation of the Bush administration’s illegal and unconstitutional positions in U.S. federal court litigation around the country, including in the U.S. Supreme Court.”

Excerpts:

• The White House is in the grip of conventional centrist wisdom. Grim results stretch from Afghanistan to the Gulf of Mexico to communities across the USA.
• The president (by nominating Kagan) has taken a step that jeopardizes civil liberties and other basic constitutional principles. … Unless the Senate refuses to approve Kagan for the Supreme Court, the nation’s top court is very likely to become more hostile to civil liberties and less inclined to put limits on presidential power.
• Here is yet another clear indication that progressives must mobilize to challenge the White House on matters of principle. Otherwise, history will judge us harshly — and it should.
• For more than 15 months, evidence has mounted that President Obama routinely combines progressive rhetoric with contrary actions. As one bad decision after another has emanated from the Oval Office, some progressives have favored denial — even though, if the name “Bush” or “McCain” had been attached to the same presidential policies, the same progressives would have been screaming bloody murder.
• But enabling bad policies, with silent acquiescence or anemic dissent, encourages more of them. At this point, progressive groups and individuals who pretend that Obama’s policies merely need a few tweaks, or just suffer from a few anomalous deficiencies, are whistling past a political graveyard.
• The corporate-military centrism of the Obama administration has demoralized and demobilized the Democratic Party’s largely progressive base …. For progressives, giving the Obama administration one benefit of the doubt after another has not prevented matters from getting worse. …. Progressives should fight the Kagan nomination.

Written by Mike Bock

In his commencement speech at the historically black college, Hampton University, last Sunday, President Barack Obama said, “education is what has always allowed us to meet the challenges of a changing world,” and, speaking to the Hampton graduates, he said, “You’re in a strong position to out compete workers around the world.”

But, he told the graduates, “What’s at stake is more than our ability to out compete other nations. It’s our ability to make democracy work in our own nation. Now, years after he left office, decades after he penned the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson sat down, a few hours’ drive from here, in Monticello, and wrote a letter to a longtime legislator, urging him to do more on education. And Jefferson gave one principal reason — the one, perhaps, he found most compelling. ‘If a nation expects to be ignorant and free,’h e wrote, ‘it expects what never was and never will b e.’

“What Jefferson recognized, like the rest of that gifted founding generation, was that in the long run, their improbable experiment — called America — wouldn’t work if its citizens were uninformed, if its citizens were apathetic, if its citizens checked out, and left democracy who those — to those who didn’t have the best interests of all the people at heart. It could only work if each of us stayed informed and engaged; if we held our government accountable; if we fulfilled the obligations of citizenship.

“The success of their experiment, they understood, depended on the participation of its people — the participation of Americans like all of you. The participation of all those who have ever sought to perfect our union .”

See You-tube here

Written By Mike Bock