An Election of Superlatives

Consider the unprecedented nature of the decision we have to make on November 6th between the two major-party candidates.

On the one hand, we have an incumbent President who is also a Nobel Peace Prize winner.  This man, lauded for his efforts to bring “peace” to the world by the perhaps-naive Nobel Committee, is also presiding over the expansion of apparently perpetual secret/shadow wars to kill “terrorists/enemy combatants” on what appears to be a virtually unlimited battlefield through the use of unmanned drone strikes.

Among senior Obama administration officials, there is a broad consensus that such operations are likely to be extended at least another decade. Given the way al-Qaeda continues to metastasize, some officials said no clear end is in sight.

“We can’t possibly kill everyone who wants to harm us,” a senior administration official said. “It’s a necessary part of what we do. . . .We’re not going to wind up in 10 years in a world of everybody holding hands and saying, ‘We love America.’ ”

On the other hand, we have a fabulously wealthy financier whose belief in “American exceptionalism” is so great that he made (and continues to make) quite a bit of his money through offshoring American jobs to foreign nations, including China, a country that he has vowed to “get tough on.”

Right now a company named Sensata is moving equipment out of a factory in Freeport, Ill., and shipping it to a factory in China. Sensata will be laying off all of the American workers, but first they are making the workers train their Chinese replacements. The workers' last day is the day before our election. Here's the thing: This company is owned by Bain Capital, and Mitt Romney -- who says he is against shipping jobs to China -- will make a fortune from the move to China.

The Sensata employees have set up a camp outside the factory that they call Bainport and are trying to stop the Bain trucks that are moving the equipment out for shipment to China. These soon-to-be-jobless workers have asked Romney to come help them.

This is a tremendous opportunity for Mitt Romney. As the former head of Bain Capital and with all the visibility of a presidential campaign, he could step in and help these workers. It offers him the chance to demonstrate to voters that he means the things he says on the campaign trail, and is not just saying these things to get votes. But Romney has refused.

And one more bite at this bitter offshoring apple:

"Romney's campaign did not deny that he profited from the auto bailout in an email to The Hill, but it said the report showed the Detroit intervention was 'misguided.'"

The truth? On June 1, 2009, the Obama administration announced that Detroit Piston's owner Tom Gores, GM and the US Treasury would buy back Delphi.The plan called for saving 15 of 29 Delphi factories in the US.

Then the vulture funds pounced.

The Nation discovered that, in the two weeks immediately following the announcement of the Delphi jobs-saving plan, Paul Singer, Romney's partner, secretly bought up over a billion dollars of old Delphi bonds for pennies on the dollar.

Singer and partners now controlled the company - and killed the return of Delphi to GM.

These facts were revealed in a sworn deposition of Delphi's Chief Financial Officer John Sheehan, confidential, but now released on the Web.

Sheehan said, under oath, that these speculators threatened to withhold key parts (steering columns), from GM. This would have brought the auto maker to its knees, immediately forcing GM's permanent closure.

The extortion worked. The government money that was supposed to go to save jobs went to Singer's hedge fund, Elliott Management Corporation and its partners, including the Romneys.

Once Singer's crew took control of Delphi, they rapidly completed the move to China, sticking the US taxpayers with the bill for the pensions of the Delphi workers cut loose.

Dan Loeb, a million-dollar donor to the GOP, who made three-quarters of a billion dollars off the legal scam, proudly announced that, once he and Elliott took control, Delphi kept "virtually no North American unionized labor."

In all, three hedge funds run by Romney's million-dollar donors have pocketed $4.2 billion, a return on their "investment" of over 3,000 percent - all care of the US taxpayer. The Romneys personally earned a minimum of $15.3 million, though more likely $115 million - a range their campaign does not dispute.

So there you have it.  Perpetual war from a Nobel Peace Prize winner, and a history of profiting off of job offshoring from the man who claims his business acumen makes him uniquely qualified to lift the American economy out of its doldrums and create jobs.  These are the two candidates who will receive the vast majority of votes in less than 2 weeks’ time.

There are other candidates out there, of course.  There is Gary Johnson, the standard-bearer for the Libertarian Party, and there is Jill Stein, the candidate for the Green Party.  And beyond those two (the most prominent of the third parties, due to their being on the ballot in most states) there are countless other candidates to choose from.

It is notable that the two major party candidates would both bring with them more war, and the two primary third-party candidates would both not only end the wars the U.S. is currently engaged in, but cut the military budget and global footprint further than even proposed under the dreaded “sequester”.  Why do we never hear from the third party candidates in the mainstream media (even when one of them gets arrested outside the second presidential debate for “disorderly conduct” for trying to enter the building and participate)?  Could it be that war is always good for business, particularly for the media?  Are Americans not “ready” to hear what these other parties have to say, or is the game rigged to only operate in black-and-white mode, and thus deny a real choice?

I’m certainly not the first person to notice the conundrum that what we view as American “democracy” is truly a carefully-curated pageant that restricts the amount of political choice Americans are presented with.  According to the Commission on Presidential Debates (the CPD, itself a product of a bipartisan agreement between the two major parties) a candidate must receive 15% of support in national polling to be allowed to participate in the prime-time televised presidential debates:

The CPD's third criterion requires that the candidate have a level of support of at least 15% (fifteen percent) of the national electorate as determined by five selected national public opinion polling organizations, using the average of those organizations' most recent publicly-reported results at the time of the determination.

And how, one might ask, does a candidate receive 15% of public support outside of being involved with the two major party apparatuses?  MONEY!  It certainly worked for billionaire (and anti-NAFTA economic nationalist, I might add) Ross Perot, didn’t it?  He ended up with 18.9% of the vote in the 1992 election, to Bill Clinton’s 43% and George H.W. Bush’s 37.5% after appearing onstage with the two major party nominees – having a well-funded 50-state operation can make outcomes like that happen.

“But we have a public financing system for the presidential race!” you might say.  And you would be right, we do.  But again, you get to the chicken-and-egg difficulty of trying to make an impact on the national electorate without the aid of money, which can help one buy media coverage (or without media coverage, which can help one to raise more money):

Minor or third party nominees may also be eligible for federal funding, but the process is a bit more complex.  A minor party candidate's public funding grant is based on a formula subject to the percentage of votes the party received in the previous presidential general election. The candidate is only eligible for general election public funds if the party's candidate received at least 5 percent of the vote in the previous presidential election.

How does one get one’s name and message out to the public without media coverage, so as to achieve polling and electoral support needed to gain access to both the debates (which again, serve to further get one’s name and message out to the public) and to public financing?  How does one raise money without media support, in order to show electoral viability?  How does one get media coverage without money to run ads, which, again, portray a sense of viability? 

Five percent of the national vote may not sound like a high bar to hurdle, but consider that in the 2008 election, approximately 127 million votes were cast.  Thus, you’d need about 6,350,000 votes to make the 5% threshold that would enable your party to access public financing. 

A useful Wikipedia page detailing the 2008 Presidential election fundraising totals shows the overall fundraising and spending breakdowns for the candidates (I’ve only left in the two major party candidates and the Libertarian and Green Party candidates for brevity:

 

Candidate (Party)	Amount raised	Amount spent	Votes	Avg $ per vote
Barack Obama (D)	$778,642,962	$760,370,195	69,498,215	$10.94
John McCain (R)	$383,913,834	$358,008,447	59,948,240	$5.97
Bob Barr (L)	$1,383,681	$1,345,202	523,713	$2.57
Cynthia McKinney (G)	$240,130	$238,968	161,680	$1.48
*Excludes spending by independent expenditure concerns.	Source: Federal Election Commission

To say that the third parties were outgunned in 2008 is a massive understatement.  The Libertarian candidate received about 8% of the 6,500,000 votes he would have needed to cross that 5% threshold to achieve public financing for the next election cycle, and the Green party candidate received about 2.5% of the number of votes needed to achieve 5% of the national vote.  Clearly there is a lot of ground to be made up!

If you view the realm of politics as a market, you will notice that the choices presented by our media and the official apparatus that governs presidential debates comprise a duopoly – there are only two choices, we are told. 

And yet, are there no worthwhile policy ideas beyond the Democratic and Republican 2012 party platforms?  If you care about enhancing the peacefulness of our world, it does not appear that you have a great option among the two major parties this year.  If you care about holding Wall Street accountable for the massive frauds perpetrated on the American public, and want to see the perpetrators go to jail, well you’re not going to find your candidate in the major parties this cycle either. 

Let me be clear: I am in no way, shape, or form arguing that there are not differences between the Democratic and Republican candidates for president this year; such arguments are a frequent meme among political cynics, but they are without merit.  The differences are stark, in terms of foreign policy, fiscal policy, social policy, etc.  Those differences ought not to be glossed over.  I am also not arguing the relative value of one or the other side’s polices at this point, despite my fairly obvious leanings.  Those arguments are for another time.

My point is simply that there are other ideas out there, other voices, and other constituencies that our political system, our democracy, is at present set up to exclude, rather than include.  This amounts to an undermining of free speech, of the free flow of ideas that theoretically characterizes the superiority of a representative democracy over other forms of government.  Let the two major parties have their ideas and policies challenged in an open debate; let the American public be offered something more than a two-party choice. 

Such changes clearly will not happen this election cycle, but through organizing and building constituencies, positive changes can be made for the future to break the two-party hold over political discourse in this country.  I have some ideas on this topic to expand upon at a later date, given the time.

The President’s big speech today

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If you haven’t had a chance to watch this speech, please do, I’ll wait…otherwise, the transcript is here, helpfully provided by the LA Times.  By way of background, the location of the speech today was a city in Kansas where, 101 years ago, President Theodore Roosevelt gave a speech famously calling for a “New Nationalism” and proposing his “Square Deal” to the American people.  Was President Obama being slightly ambitious in his choice of historical contextualization?  Perhaps, but to my mind it was well worth the risk.

Now then.  While this speech was touted as an “economic” speech, the tenor and content ranged far more widely than simple concepts of supply and demand.  President Obama laid out a new framework for the American economy, with the explicit goal being to rebuild and expand the middle class.  He made the argument that government should not try to “fix” all the problems of society, but that government should work on behalf of the people’s interests.

With a forcefulness that has been heretofore lacking in most of his presidential speeches, President Obama called out greed, irresponsibility, and the continuing fallacy that is “trickle-down economics.”  He called for new rules of the road that apply to everyone, not just to Main Street, but to Wall Street as well.  He defended the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill, and made a stirring statement about the importance of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and its soon-to-be-blocked Director nominee, former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray. 

One of the more memorable phrases to come out of the speech is President Obama’s term “you’re on your own economics” to characterize the preferred economic plan of the GOP.  The contrast came with President Obama’s insistence that American prosperity, long-term prosperity, is gained together, in contrast to the “YoYo” economic ideas of the GOP. 

But President Obama’s speech led up to what I felt was the culminating point: illustrating for the American people that there is a different form of capitalism available; one that is more responsible and ultimately self-sustaining than the winner-take-all capitalism we’ve endured the past 30 years.  The President spoke of Marvin Windows, of Warroad, Minnesota, and described (skip to the last 7 or so minutes of the video clip to catch it) how the company has never laid off a single worker in its 100+ year history, despite enduring the Great Depression and the ongoing Great Recession.  How did Marvin achieve that feat?  Simple; through shared sacrifice from both the workforce and the management when times have been tough.  The President didn’t get into details, obviously, but his simple illustration of what could be summed up for the audience that change, true change, is within our grasp if we see each other as fellow citizens, and recognize that prosperity will be gained through helping each other out, rather than shorting each other constantly.  Responsible capitalism is what we ought to strive for, rather than a corporate ethos solely driven by the fiduciary responsibility to shareholders.

The President attacked inequality sharply, broadly, and directly, and proposed some new/old ideas to guide us out of the predicament we find ourselves in as a nation.  If it was a speech somewhat lacking in the soaring rhetoric of campaign Obama of 2008, the sober tone reflected the weighty concerns facing the man as President.  In time, I believe this speech will be seen to be a major one, where he describes the economic goalposts as they have been set for the past number of decades, and proposes that we, as a nation, make the effort to shift them back so that the goal is within the majority’s reach once again.  This speech sets the stage for the 2012 campaign, surely, but it also challenges Americans to greater collective achievements. 

I don’t normally watch presidential speeches, but this one had me riveted from the start.  I’ll give Greg Sargent the last word on this topic, the final paragraph of a typically insightful blog post on the speech:

Political scientists will tell you that individual speeches don’t matter; and that grand themes are very unlikely to supplant the direct experience of the economy as a motivator of voters. But we’ll be hearing these themes countless times between now and election day. And anyone who had hoped that Obama and Dems would make an unapologetically populist and moral case against inequality and economic injustice central to Campaign 2012 should be pretty pleased with what they heard today.

Elite tensions with democracy

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Chris Hayes has been the Editor at Large for The Nation magazine for a few years now, among numerous other gigs, and now has his own show on MSNBC on Saturday and Sunday mornings.  It’s a brilliant re-envisioning of the stale weekly public affairs shows dominated by the same rotating cast of characters, in part because of the sheer diversity of the guests Hayes features.  Sunday’s program had 3 women at the table along with Hayes and another male guest, for example.  Try finding that sort of gender-ratio on “Meet the Nation News Sunday.”  Beyond the guests, however, the show strives to offer a diversity of opinions on a multitude of topical stories, and to dig into the details of what’s happening and why in a way the typical news program is simply unable to.  As a perfect example and segway into my point, in the video above, Hayes lays out an argument as to why the Supercommittee’s failure this past week is in fact a good thing for America; his sentiments are ones that I have been mulling over recently myself.  Do watch it.

Hayes mentions the recent ascensions to the top leadership posts of two technocrats in Greece and Italy, noting that their jobs, their mandates upon entering office, are to push through deeply unpopular austerity packages over the will of the majority of their supposed constituents. 

Technocracy has suddenly become all the rage amidst the debt crisis of the eurozone. In Greece, prime minister George Papandreou was ousted in favour of the unelected former central banker Lucas Papademos, after he had the effrontery to call the referendum that never was. In Italy, Mario Monti, the unelected former EU commissioner, has anointed a cabinet of academics, bankers and an admiral, without a single representative of Italy’s political parties. This novel step is designed to reassure international bond markets, which have recently pushed Italy’s yields to perilous levels. (emphasis added)

Key takeaway: the political process is anathema to international finance. 

Consider a few short weeks ago when then-Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou had (shockingly!) called for a national referendum to be held on the terms of an European Union/International Monetary Fund bailout plan that would have included harsh austerity measures to be imposed on the Greek people.  The markets crashed, and the two biggest European economies’ leaders reacted with scorn:

At a bruising meeting in Cannes on Wednesday night, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel warned [Papandreou] that Athens would not receive a cent more in aid until it met its commitments to the euro zone.

Greece was due to get a vital 8 billion euro installment this month and says it will run out of money in mid-December if it does not get the loan.

Despite the turmoil in Athens and uncertainty over the euro zone, European stock markets and the euro rallied in volatile trading as the likelihood grew that Greece would not hold the highly risky referendum.

Note that opening the decision-making process up to those who will bear the brunt of any economic decisions made by the powers-that-be, the citizenry, is tantamount, in this calculation, to introducing high risk into the equation.  The cold logic of finance, of interest rates and debt-to-GDP ratios, does not comport well with the warm inefficient fuzziness of the electorate, with their myriad voices and parochial/familial concerns.  How are the financiers supposed to get their bailouts when the poor rubes paying for it demand something more than the simple extraction of wealth from their country? 

The power relationships on evidence in the foregoing snippet of the Greek referendum situation are revealing: the larger “creditor” economies of France and Germany here acted as front-line enforcers with the wayward Greek leader Papandreou; the EU, a supra-national body of European nations acted in concert with the IMF, another supra-national body representing the strictly monetary interests of client nations, to craft a bailout package for Greece that brings great pain to the Greek people; meanwhile, the Greek people are demonstrating and rioting in the streets by the tens or hundreds of thousands to show their disapproval, and yet, they are pawns in the grand scheme.  What are the Greek people supposed to do when it seems the entire world (particularly the sanctimonious Germans) is blaming them as a people for being profligate – where are they to turn to voice their opinions democratically when the one opportunity they would have had to do so is brutally snatched away from them by shadowy international forces?

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This sordid and ongoing tale of crisis in Europe reveals the flipside to the ethos of globalization that has dominated international politics since the early days of the “Washington Consensus”.  In order to govern worldwide flows of goods, services and capital, world-bestriding structures of governance must be created.  To the extent that those structures are endowed with the authority to act in crises, those actions are by nature going to be out of the direct control of the citizenry of the nations affected, thus denying the citizens of the world recourse to shape the responses of those supra-national institutions.  The structures of these institutions ensure that their responsiveness will be primarily directed towards the largest stakeholders – the largest economies and the largest private financial institutions – thus making the decisions made representative of the policy prescriptions of an even more rarefied status of elites.  Power is thus concentrated further, with the results trickling down upon the rest of us.  And again, we have effectively no recourse to change much at all. 

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The notion that centralization=efficiency, related to the economic concept of “economies of scale,” has reigned supreme in much of the modern industrialized world.  We see these tenets manifested in the superstores we shop at, the industrially-produced agriculture we purchase, and the (public) school systems we send our children to be educated at, for just a few examples.  Our governmental policies, and indeed, the growth of the federal government itself in the past century, has reflected the notion that centralized governance is necessarily better for all due to greater standardization of outputs and efficiencies gained.

And yet, centralization creates with it a certain culture as well, an elite culture where those well-versed in the human power relationships and bureaucratic operations of the institutions influence the direction of decision-making to their own ends.  Centralization creates, not only an institution’s set of substantive actions with which it operates in society, but an entire class of administrators devoted to the upkeep and promulgation of the institution itself through budgeting, revenue collection, inter-institutional lobbying, and so forth.  Institutions, first and foremost, desire to keep existing, thus creating a tension with their public service functions.

I would argue that much of the Occupy-inspired debate currently ongoing in our society is at least in part related to the discussion of how much the public interest is served by various institutions of government versus how much those institutions merely serve as vehicles for particular interests to enact their wills.  The public wants accountability for the financial sector, but the relevant regulators have shown themselves to be rather more beholden to the interests of Big Finance than the public interest (see my posts on housing for more on that).  The public wants more investment in clean energy, yet there is an institutional structure within our government dedicated to fossil fuels, from the military fighting wars that just happen to be in oil-rich regions, to the massive tax breaks and other indirect subsidies for fossil fuels baked into our tax code.  How do we get the changes the populace wants enacted into law?  We have to rely on elected representatives with a slew of other institutional and professional competing interests to act on our behalf – not an easy thing to do, apparently!

The clear answer to these problems appears to be decentralization – a reduction of the scale of decision-making to a more manageable, democratic, and community-oriented size.  The General Assemblies occurring at the Occupy encampments around the country have represented that trend most vividly, as Chris Hayes highlighted in the clip above.  While some efficiency may certainly be lost along the way, democracy and true representation can be gained, ensuring that the rule of an unaccountable elite, such as we are witnessing today, is significantly more difficult to achieve.  Consider the supra-national institutions I’ve noted above – they are, if anything, abstractions of representative government; meta-representative democracies, if you will.  Who are their constituents but other client states and their assorted national economic interests?  Who are their leaders but those who have been most agreeable to said client states and economic interests?  How have you been personally helped by the IMF lately?

I hope to pick up further threads of this discussion in a future post, as there’s a lot to the topic of decentralization to discuss.  As always, your comments are welcomed and appreciated in the comments area below.

The #Occupy movement and the generations

Just a short note of gratitude and no small amount of incredulity at the cross-generational dialogues that have been fostered through and around the Occupy movement, which I and others view as largely a Millenial generation-driven thing.  I was just reading a well-done post by Charles B. Pierce at Esquire’s Politics Blog and noting his tone lamenting the political fecklessness of many of those from his generation now holding the reins of power:

How hard can this be? How hard is it to tell people to get angry at the people who really are making off with their country's wealth and their personal futures, especially when it's the god's honest truth? How hard is it to tell people that they are not the enemy, that to shoot pepper spray into the eyes of a college student is to spit in the eye of everyone else? Please do not hand me concerns for your "political viability." That makes you cowards. The protesters are doing the hard work. They're the ones living in a dozen tiny Argentinas all around this country. They're the ones getting beaten up and tortured, on TV, with chemical agents. They're the ones going to jail. All I'm asking is that you all have their backs, and all you have to do is get up and give a whole bunch of speeches saying so. Right now, they're pretty much out their on an island while empty charlatans like Newt Gingrich and prissy little shmoes like David Brooks are beating them over the head rhetorically, while the cops are more than happy — indeed, damned near gleeful — to do it in person.

Barney Frank wonders where the Occupiers were during the elections of 2010? Give them a politics worthy of their courage and they'll show up. This does not seem to me to be a difficult problem, but it does appear possibly to be the last chance for progressive politics for an awfully long time. You don't need an $850,000 contract to see that.

That second bolded sentence “Give them a politics worthy of their courage and they’ll show up” sounds like one of the best lines I’ve heard this year, for both its succinct razor-edge of truth, to its political astuteness.  This generation out protesting, my generation, is the one that greatly helped President Obama get elected.  We came out of the Bush era scarred (as I’ve noted previously) and looking for a change that Obama appeared to represent.  But more than that, he represented prudent judgment in correctly sizing up many of the true threats to our country (the undercutting of civil liberties domestically and human rights abroad, being cogent for me in particular) and, yes, a courage in his opposition to the Iraq War that was greatly lacking in the politics of those days, and even moreso today.  The reality of President Obama has been drastically different from the representation of Candidate Obama, but at the time, he showed a side of politics that people yearned for.  Show us courageous politicians taking stands that put them on the right side of popular sentiment, particularly in the face of a potential loss of big money campaign donors, and I bet my generation will show up.

So it is with that background in mind that I have been considering the amount of support I see and hear from older generations for the movement now sweeping America.  A close family member informed me that on her recent trip to New York she happened upon an Occupy Wall Street group at a public park (not Zuccotti, mind you) and was very impressed with the “human microphone” and the positive, steadfast energy the group displayed, despite it being an awful, rainy NYC November day.  The Facebook posts I see from Gen-Xers, Baby Boomers, and on up regarding the Occupy Movement evince a strong bond between the generations that I don’t think I’ve ever seen as clearly in my life. 

I had always feared that the elites’ plan to divide the entitlement program pie, and to set those of us in younger generations on a different retirement plan than our parents, threatened to separate the generations (which is probably the point!) and why you still hear many GOP candidates discussing giving young people the “option” of purchasing health savings accounts and the like.  The fact that we’re all working and saving towards a common fund, a common vision, means we’re all in it together, to some extent, despite the fact that the powers-that-be want all that locked-up Social Security and Medicare money to be released to the predations and speculations of Wall Street. 

But now, the elites have played their hand too far.  They’ve effectively united a strong bloc of people across the generations because, let’s face it, we’ve all been looted in some way or another.  We recognize a common enemy: the collusion between big business and big government that works to undercut our rights and to separate an already economically-stratified society into one where you have vastly different justice systems, depending on your standing and net worth (witness this egregious hit-and-run case from Colorado last year involving a “wealth manager” and a cyclist for a great/horrifying example).  There’s no justice for those on the top, but a harsh and exacting justice for those of us not at the top.  Witness the UC Davis pepper-spraying last Friday:

Glenn Greenwald’s take on the UC Davis situation adroitly points towards the larger issue at play in our society:

The UC-Davis Chancellor responsible for the pepper-spraying of her students, Linda Katehi, today went on Good Morning America and explained why she should not resign or otherwise be held accountable: “we really need to start the healing process and move forward.” On a radio program in the afternoon, she expanded on this view by saying: “We need to move on.” So apparently — yet again — the only way everyone can begin to “heal” and “move forward” is if everyone agrees that those in power with the greatest responsibility be fully shielded from any consequences and that their bad acts be simply forgotten. I wonder where she learned that justifying rationale?

We yearn for justice as a society.  The concept of justice embedded in the Constitution argues that those at the top and those at the bottom ought to be equal in the eyes of the law, and yet, the past decade has clearly shown how far our society has gotten from those founding principles.  Occupy, for all of its media-unfriendliness and potential to turn off the “median voter,” is a nascent attempt at reclaiming that original concept of justice.  Justice is anathema to the powers-that-be, as their gains are largely ill-gotten and their positions in society often depend on their being the the best operators within a system of legalized corruption.  The moment their hold on power slips, and they no longer control the levers of power and the judiciary, they will be subject to the comeuppance that has been long in coming, and much delayed. 

Greenwald quotes Rosa Luxemburg’s epic comment to wonderful effect:

“Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.”

If you look askance at the Occupy movement, and you see nothing but a bunch of rowdy young people lacking drive and ambition, ask yourself how you’re constrained in your own life.  What cutbacks have you had to make to your hopes and dreams, let alone your financial position?  How many of those setbacks are due entirely to your own poor judgment or over-extension, rather than being at least in part the shock wave from a system of willfully-created asset bubbles and legislatively-endorsed corruption imploding upon itself?  If you trace the origins of your own problems back to their logical starting points, do they solely originate from your decisions?  That is the line of thinking the powers-that-be hope you’ll take away.  Heaven forbid you should look up the food chain to discover how usury has been made legal and how student loans are no longer discharged in bankruptcy; how insolvent banks are allowed to claim the full face value of toxic assets to bolster their bottom lines, and yet how lying to get food stamps to feed one’s two children can net you 3 years in federal prison.  “Justice,” these days, comes at the expense of the rest of us.  We can see this fact in all its harsh reality and find a unity in it, or we can deny deny deny that the mirror the Occupy movement is holding up to our society reflects far more of our collective life experiences of brokenness and unnecessary misery than we’d care to admit. 

Thank you to those of the older generations who see the Occupy movement not as a threat, but as the opportunity for a rebirth.  We need you, and you need us.  We ARE in this together.

Ask and ye shall receive

As a follow-up to my post from last week regarding polling on the question of whether the GOP is purposely sabotaging economic recovery in order to defeat President Obama next year, I thought I’d bring my dear readers’ attentions to the results of two new polls released today that cover similar territory.  I had mentioned that the Suffolk University poll from last week was just crying out for additional data to help discern a trend or not, and it appears we have some further data to work with now.

First off, a Washington Post/ABC News poll of 1,004 adults, with a 3.5% margin of error asked the following question:

Which of the following statements comes closest to your point of view? Statement A: (President Obama is making a good faith effort to deal with the country's economic problems, but the Republicans in Congress are playing politics by blocking his proposals and programs.) Or Statement B: (President Obama has not provided leadership on the economy, and he is just blaming the Republicans in Congress as an excuse for not doing his job.)

Compare the wording to that of last week’s Suffolk University poll:

Do you think the Republicans are intentionally stalling efforts to jumpstart the economy to insure that Barack Obama is not reelected?

The WaPo/ABC poll is not as clear with respondents about the political intent of any perceived economic sabotage on the GOP’s part – referring to “playing politics” rather than “to insure that Barack Obama is not reelected” – but the underlying message is essentially the same: do you think the GOP is purposely making the economy worse for political purposes?  The results:

Which of the following statements comes closest to your point of view? Statement A: (President Obama is making a good faith effort to deal with the country's economic problems, but the Republicans in Congress are playing politics by blocking his proposals and programs.) Or Statement B: (President Obama has not provided leadership on the economy, and he is just blaming the Republicans in Congress as an excuse for not doing his job.)

Obama making a good effort: 50
Obama has not provided leadership: 44
Both (vol.): 2
Neither (vol.): 2
No opinion: 1

And once again, the results of the Suffolk poll:

Do you think the Republicans are intentionally stalling efforts to jumpstart the economy to insure that Barack Obama is not reelected?

Yes 49
No 39
Undecided 12

Okay then!  Seems like there could be something more to this meme now.  Greg Sargent pulls out the internals of the WaPo poll, providing more points of interest:

The toplines: Americans agree with the first statement over the second one, 50-44. According to numbers sent my way by the Post polling team, this is more pronounced among moderates and independents:

* Independents favor statement one over statement two by 54-40.

* Moderates favor statement one over statement two by 57-37.

The overall number is lower, at 50 percent, because a hilariously meager nine percent of Republicans believe this to be the case.

Who likes to have their side accused of “playing politics” with anything?  It just sounds offensive when we’re talking about real peoples’ lives and the overall economy, no wonder only 9% of Republicans agree with statement #1.

Our third poll of the day, which Talking Points Memo’s Brian Beutler argues constitutes a “trend,” (I would agree) is one commissioned by the liberal blog DailyKos:

Also on Monday, liberal blogger Markos Moulitsas publicized the top lines of a PPP poll he commissioned, which closely mimic the the Post/ABC survey: “50% think GOP intentionally stalling economy, incl 51% of Indies, & 15% of GOPers. Details Tuesday.”

So here we have three polls showing broadly similar results to similarly-worded questions (although the exact wording of the DailyKos poll will be out tomorrow) and which also show that a majority of independents ascribe to some version of the notion that the GOP is deliberately sabotaging the economy.  As we are all surely aware now, the vast and growing “middle” of the electorate is where the true electoral battleground lies for 2012 (and virtually every modern election) so it would appear that President Obama has the upper hand with this crucial slice of the populace, no?  Steve Benen, echoing Greg Sargent, notes the inherent danger of the polls’ findings for the President:

Though in theory, it should, this won’t necessarily give President Obama a boost. The degree of national cynicism is so intense, many Americans may simply assume Republicans are sabotaging the national economy, but take their frustrations out on the president anyway. As Greg noted, “The number who see Obama as a strong leader is now upside down (48-51), suggesting yet again that even if Americans understand that Republicans are deliberately blocking Obama’s policies, they may conclude that his failure to get around them just shows he’s weak or ineffectual.”

Voters’ understanding of the political process is severely limited, and many Americans likely fail to appreciate the role Congress must play in policymaking. There are no doubt plenty of voters thinking, “Sure, Republicans are sabotaging the economy, but why can’t Obama just go around them?” unaware of the fact that, on a grand scale, this isn’t an option. (emphasis added)

Indeed, President Obama’s failure to “get around” Congress is the true reason why he’s embarked on his “jobs tour” the past couple months – taking his message directly to the people of America, urging them to contact their Congressmember and tell them to act on jobs and the economy.  In a broad sense, it appears the efforts are paying off, according to Josh Marshall.  Furthermore, the amount of braying from the GOP about “class warfare” from the President has increased proportionally as his jobs message has caught on.  Witness Rep. Eric Cantor’s aborted speech about “income inequality” (note: he canceled the speech when it was revealed that Occupy protesters planned to respond to him by exercising their free speech rights) and Rep. Paul Ryan’s speech to the conservative Heritage Foundation largely predicated on the notion that America needs to preserve its heritage of economic mobility through surprise! not raising taxes on the wealthiest among us.  (Note: he’s wrong about our economic mobility rates compared to other countries.) 

So where does all of this data leave us now?  Well it would seem that President Obama needs to work closely with the Democrats in Congress to present a focused message (not easy with Democrats, ever) regarding the GOP’s obstructionism.  Pushing the “sabotage” message, in concert with more polling data showing similar results to those presented here, will force the media to cover the sabotage meme more widely and thus put the Republicans on defense on job creation – exactly the situation they hope not to find themselves in heading into a still-very-unsettled GOP presidential primary season and an election year.  President Obama’s rather limited moves last week on student loan reform, homeowner relief and jobs proposals for veterans might represent a good-faith show of effort for those skeptical independents and moderates doubting his leadership, and they could marginally influence his standing with those key constituencies.  But overall, those moves show the Presidency’s economic weakness vis-à-vis Congress, and the relative ineffectiveness of the Executive branch’s sprawling bureaucracy to help improve peoples’ lives in a truly meaningful way.  Coordinated actions between the Executive and Legislative branches are what is needed, but until Obama and the Democrats can find leverage points to force the Congressional GOP’s hands on job creating legislation, it is unlikely the President will be able to do much more than chip away at the margins of the economic problems facing this country, winning message or not.