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Obama Takes Charge — Will He Bail Out America?
By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Posted on November 29, 2008, Printed on November 29, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/109017/

Barack Obama has said that there can only be one president at a time. By all appearances, in the midst of an almost unprecedented economic meltdown, it is he.

Obama gave three press conferences this week, aimed at reassuring a jittery nation — and world — that he was preparing to tackle the recession head-on. Even as Bush’s Treasury Department announced an array of new interventions to prop up the moribund economy, Bush himself has been out of sight and out of mind. On Tuesday, while Obama was calling for a massive spending program to boost slacking demand for everything from houses to cars to consumer gadgets, Bush was in Kentucky, “thanking” troops returning from his wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Bush hasn’t held a full presser since August.

Obama hinted that he would adopt an approach that progressives have been urging Washington to take since the economy went into free-fall: spending as much as $800 billion to revive the “nuts and bolts” economy. It’s a marked difference from the Bush administration’s (almost) singular focus — which, in fairness, appears to be changing — on recapitalizing large, teetering financial institutions.

The task the new president will face is daunting. New economic data released this week show an increasing risk of a “deflationary spiral” in which layoffs that follow the massive pile of national wealth that has evaporated in the financial crisis and bursting housing bubble — and the fear of being hurt by the economic mess among those whose jobs are secure — cause people to rein in spending, which causes the supply of just about everything to outstrip demand, which leads to lower prices, which hurts firms’ profits, which leads to even more layoffs and even greater economic insecurity.

The four-week average of new unemployment claims hit its highest mark since the deep recession of 1983; consumer spending, which accounts for two-thirds of the American economy, dropped by a full percentage point last month — the third consecutive monthly decline — and prices fell by more than a half-point in October. A key index of business spending dropped 4 percent in October; over the past three months, firms’ capital spending has plummeted by a rate of 33 percent per year, a figure that one prominent economist characterized as “terrifying.”

Obama Sending Right Signals

During the presidential campaign, Obama called for a $175 billion injection of cash into the economy with new infrastructure spending, help for cash-strapped state and local governments whose tax revenues have been decimated by the collapse of real estate values and a $1,000 tax credit for working families. Now, Obama and his surrogates are hinting that they might spend as much as five times that amount. On Tuesday, the president-elect called for “a two-year nationwide effort to jump-start job creation in America and lay the foundation for a strong and growing economy.” He promised to “put people back to work rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges, modernizing schools that are failing our children, and building wind farms and solar panels.” He added, “These aren’t just steps to pull ourselves out of this immediate crisis; these are long-term investments in our economic future that have been ignored for far too long.” Congressional Democrats, many of whom have been calling for such a package for some time, say that it’ll create up to 2.5 million jobs over the next two years.

In crisis, there is opportunity, and Obama appears to be seizing it. He has a clear mandate — having won not only an Electoral College landslide, but 53 percent of the popular vote — and he can, at least to some degree, use it and the financial mess to overcome the kind of ideological battles he’ll face from congressional Republicans, who have so far balked at the idea of spending on infrastructure and public works. The Washington Post reported this week that while Obama’s stimulus plan is “cast as a response to a rapidly worsening crisis, [it] could enable Obama to shift massive sums to domestic priorities that Democrats say have long been neglected, such as health care and education. It also could provide seed money to reshape major U.S. industries, hastening the production of wind and solar energy and fuel-efficient cars, for example.” Obama said the plan would be “a down payment on the type of reform my administration will bring to Washington.”

The devil, of course, is in the details, which have not been forthcoming nearly two months before Obama takes office in January. But the broad outlines of the plan he’s likely to put forth can be gleaned from the writings and public statements of his economic advisers, as well as his public statements.

The Center for American Progress (CAP) — founded by John Podesta, former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton and the head of Obama’s transition team — called for a major stimulus package in September. In its report, CAP urged lawmakers to think beyond a short-term injection of cash into consumers’ pockets, arguing that the economy needs “more than a quick fix” and the package “should address the short-term crisis in the labor market and the eight years of stagnant incomes and weak job growth.” The centerpiece of CAP’s proposal is “investing in six green infrastructure investment areas” …

Representative Hilda L. Solis, D-Calif., has proposed a Green Jobs Act that that would rapidly train workers to fill these jobs; the National Renewable Energy Laboratory identified the lack of a skilled workforce as the key nontechnical barrier to the advancement of these industries. Jobs created from this investment would be targeted at the struggling construction and manufacturing sectors.

The think-tank also called for money to fix our creaky, 19th century infrastructure — roads, bridges, energy grid, etc. — and for increased spending on hurting citizens with improved food stamps benefits (the Washington Post reported this week that the number of Americans relying on food stamps will soon hit a record 30 million), extending unemployment payments, expanding Medicaid funding to the states and helping struggling families pay their heating bills this winter.

In congressional testimony earlier this month (PDF), Gene Sperling, former head of Bill Clinton’s National Economic Council and another Obama confidant, argued that “health care initiatives can be a triple-benefit in this context. First, increases in the federal match for Medicaid can be one of the quickest and most effective means to stimulate the economy. Second, an expansion of SCHIP can be a win/win in that it can provide stimulus while moving us forward on the path to universal coverage. Third, an upfront investment in health information technology can also provide stimulus and be a down payment on the goal of reducing long-term health care costs.”

Some progressive analysts have argued that these measures prop up a dinosaur economy, and that we should be undertaking a much more fundamental transformation, especially in terms of our energy needs — where we live and how we move around and transport goods. Similarly, there’s an argument that pumping billions into an inefficient health care system that delivers the least bang for the buck in the developed world is merely throwing good money after bad. These are important points in the larger picture, and ultimately correct, but they run into a key issue when it comes to stimulating an economy in decline: short- versus long-term thinking.

Conservatives, who have already signaled opposition to a major public-works-type program, have one cogent argument on their side (semi-coherent cries of “socialism!” notwithstanding). Put simply, major projects to retool America’s industrial base and radically transform our energy economy would take a significant amount of time to get off the ground. They require planning, consensus-building among stakeholders, drawn-out legislative debates, environmental-impact studies, public input from local communities, etc. But Medicaid exists already; state and local governments are ready and needy; the infrastructure for distributing food stamps and paying unemployment bennies are in place, and Democrats in Congress have plans for upgrading America’s transportation infrastructure that are essentially ready to go — they’ve been sitting on the shelf for years, all dressed up but with nowhere to go but to an ignominious death by Bush’s veto pen.

This gets to the heart of the debate we’ll encounter when Obama takes office in January: How much various proposals will boost economic demand in the short-term versus how much investment will be made in longer-term structural changes. Here, a balance is necessary both politically and in the context of the dire situation in which American workers and employers find themselves today.

What Is Obama Willing to Give to Get His Plans Implemented?

The Obama team appears extraordinarily fond of the trial balloon, and this week they floated the possibility of allowing Bush’s “temporary” tax cuts for the richest Americans expire as scheduled in 2011, rather than rolling them back early on in his presidency as he promised on the campaign trail.

If there’s any merit to the idea — problematic as the 2009 deficit looks likely to reach an eye-popping trillion dollars — it is purely political; leaving the tax cuts in place might provide some cover for Republicans to cross over and support Obama’s broader economic rescue plan.

But while some Republican legislators are likely to see the economic woes as a freight train headed their way, and move to get their necks off the track by supporting a large-scale stimulus, it’s clear that conservative dead-enders are sticking to their discredited ideas. On Fox News this week — where else? — House Minority Leader Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, said, “If we’re really serious about creating jobs, what we ought to do is we ought to eliminate the capital-gains tax… Why not lower … corporate income taxes for corporations in America to help keep jobs here?”

The reason we shouldn’t is twofold. First, it’s among the least-efficient ways of boosting the economy available to lawmakers. Consider this table, compiled by the nonpartisan Economic Policy Center, which suggests that in this debate, the facts once again have a liberal bias:

Click for GRAPHIC @ SOURCE URL:
http://www.alternet.org/story/109017/

The second answer to Boehner’s assault on capital gains taxes is that the tools lawmakers have long relied upon to stave off recession aren’t working, and won’t. The tax burden for the wealthiest Americans has already been slashed deeply — to their lowest levels since World War II; working Americans are too far in the hole to do much with one-time checks, besides paying down their credit card balances; the rate at which the Fed lends money to banks has been cut to 1 percent — and may end up at zero before long — but when people aren’t buying, even “free” money doesn’t encourage businesses to hold the line or expand, and the financial system is teetering under a mountain of funky securities and derivatives that are almost impossible to untangle and are too large for the government to buy.

So while all options should be tried to keep a deep recession from blossoming into a generational depression, all that’s really left is the kind of national transformational project for which progressives have long called, and toward which Obama appears to be leaning: put Americans to work building a 21st century economy, give them a real stake in the outcome and allow them to share in the gains.

It’s worked before.

Joshua Holland is an AlterNet staff writer.

View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/109017/

Why Are We Shocked By Obama’s Centrism?
By David Sirota, AlterNet
Posted on November 28, 2008, Printed on November 29, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/108903/

Judging by the proliferation of capital letters in the e-mail correspondence I receive, many seem worried that Barack Obama may not deliver the promised “change we can believe in.”

After voters rejected the mantra of free trade and deregulation, some contacting me say they are upset about Obama hiring so many free-trading deregulators who birthed today’s economic mess.

With the president-elect having touted his opposition to the Iraq War, some are bothered “that Obama’s national security team will be dominated by appointees who favored the Iraq invasion and hold hawkish views,” as the Los Angeles Times reports.

Others recall Obama insisting that “change doesn’t come from Washington, change comes to Washington,” and say they are dismayed that his government will be run by Washington insiders. And still others are confused that Obama championed a progressive platform but, as The Nation’s Chris Hayes notes, “not a single, solitary, actual dyed-in-the-wool progressive” has been floated for a major cabinet position.

To my fearful letter writers, I offer three responses.

First, I counsel not fretting too much yet. While there is truth to the notion that “personnel is policy,” crises can make radicals out of former Establishmentarians, and the president-elect’s initial declarations imply a boldly progressive agenda. “Remember, Franklin Roosevelt gave no evidence in his prior career that he would lead the dramatic sea change in American politics that he led,” says historian Eric Rauchway.

Second, I tell e-mailers they are right to be somewhat distressed, right to ignore Obama loyalists who want them to shut up, and right to speak out. When President Clinton rammed George H. W. Bush’s NAFTA through Congress after candidate Clinton pledged not to, he provided ample reason to now recollect the saying “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” And voicing concern is critical. As Frederick Douglass said, “Power concedes nothing without demand.”

Finally, I ask my pen pals if they are really shocked.

Despite the election’s progressive mandate, Obama is not what Ronald Reagan was to conservatives — he is not as much the product of a movement as he is a movement unto himself. He figured out that because many “progressive” institutions are merely Democratic Party appendages and not ideological movement forces, he could build his own movement. He succeeded in that endeavor thanks to the nation’s Bush-inspired desire for change, his own skills, and a celebrity-obsessed culture.

Though many Obama supporters feel strongly about particular issues, and though polling shows the country moving left, the Obama movement undeniably revolves around the president-elect’s individual stardom — and specifically, the faith that he will make good decisions, whatever those decisions are. With that kind of following, Obama likely feels little obligation to hire staff intimately involved in non-Obama movements — especially those who might challenge a Washington ruling class he may not want to antagonize.

This is the mythic “independence” we’re supposed to crave — a czar who doesn’t owe anyone. It is the foreseeable result of a Dear Leader-ism prevalent in foreign autocracies, but never paramount in America until now — and it will have its benefits and drawbacks.

Wielding his campaign’s massive e-mail list, the new president could mobilize supporters to press Congress for a new New Deal. Or, he could mobilize that army to blunt pressure on his government for a new New Deal. The point is that Obama alone gets to choose — that for all the talk of “bottom-up” politics, his movement’s structure grants him a top-down power that no previous president had.

For better or worse, that leaves us relying more than ever on our Dear Leader’s impulses. Sure, we should be thankful when Dear Leader’s whims serve the people — but also unsurprised when they don’t.

David Sirota is a best-selling author whose newest book, “The Uprising,” was just released this month. He is a fellow at the Campaign for America’s Future and a board member of the Progressive States Network — both nonpartisan organizations. His blog is at http://www.credoaction.com/sirota

© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/108903/

Corporate Media Try to Scare Obama Into Betraying Progressives
By Norman Solomon, AlterNet
Posted on November 20, 2008, Printed on November 29, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/107934/

It’s been 16 years since a Democrat moved into the White House. Now, the fog of memory and the spin of media are teaming up to explain that Barack Obama must hew to “the center” if he knows what’s good for his presidency.

“Many political observers,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported days ago, say that Obama “must tack toward the political mainstream to avoid miscalculations made by President Bill Clinton, who veered left and fired up the 1994 Republican backlash.” This storyline provides a kind of political morality play: The new president tried to govern from the left, and Democrats lost control of Congress just two years later.

But, if facts matter, the narrative is a real head-scratcher.

During the 1992 election year, Clinton had campaigned for the White House under the mantra “Putting People First.” But as economic analyst Doug Henwood was to comment, President-elect Clinton swiftly morphed into the champion of an austerity plan that could have been called “Putting Bondholders First.”

From the outset, President Clinton made clear his commitments to the corporate centers of economic power by choosing such officials as Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen, Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, trade representative Mickey Kantor and Secretary of State Warren Christopher.

Soon after becoming president, Clinton abandoned his few initial stances that might qualify as “left.” He quickly deserted his brief position for gay rights in the military. Under fire for his nomination of progressive law professor Lani Guinier to be assistant attorney general for civil rights, Clinton tossed her overboard.

In sharp contrast, the new president fought like hell for the corporate-beloved trade agreement known as NAFTA. And he spread his wings as a deficit hawk, while his campaign’s pledges of “public investment” fell to earth with paltry line items. Less than five months into his presidency, Newsweek lauded Clinton’s “shift to the right” and urged him to show “the backbone” to stay there.

But none of that has stopped the media’s clucking about the Clinton administration’s early “lurch to the left.” The myth never died, though it was quickly ripe for debunking.

In real time, one of the most astute debunkers was Barbara Ehrenreich. As the only writer from the left with a regular column in a major U.S. newsmagazine (she later got the boot), Ehrenreich wrote a Time piece in mid-June 1993 that directly addressed the nascent mythology. The incoming president’s leftward lurch was “a neat parable,” she noted, “but it never happened.”

Ehrenreich added: “The lurch to the left is like the ‘stab in the back’ invented by right-wing Germans after World War One: an instant myth designed to discredit all one’s political enemies in one fell swoop. … Maybe it’s been so long that we’ve forgotten what ‘left’ is and how to tell it from right. At the simplest, most ecumenical level, to be on the left means to take the side of the underdog, whoever that may be: the meek, the poor and, generally speaking, the ‘least among us,’ as a well-known representative of the left position put it a couple of millenniums ago.”

More than 15 years after Barbara Ehrenreich wrote those words, the tall tale of President Clinton’s lurch to the left is still in the air. Warning Democratic politicians against being “liberal” or moving “left” remains a time-honored — even compulsive — media ritual. But as Barack Obama fills key economic posts in his administration, the left-leery and corporate-friendly press is likely to be quite content.

Norman Solomon’s latest book Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State (PoliPointPress) is available now. For more information go to http://www.madelovegotwar.com

© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/107934/

How Obama Can Help Redeem the White House
By Amy Goodman, Truthdig
Posted on November 13, 2008, Printed on November 29, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/106960/

Alice Walker is the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. But Monday, I called her to talk about a true story. The Obamas had just visited the White House. The first African-American elected president of the United States had visited his soon-to-be residence, a house built by slaves. Walker told me: “Even when they were building it, you know, in chains or in desperation and in sadness, they were building it for him. Ancestors take a very long view of life, and they see what is coming.” The author of The Color Purple, who writes about slavery and redemption, went on, “This is a great victory of the spirit and for people who have had to live basically by faith.”

Many decades ago, Alice Walker had broken anti-miscegenation laws in Mississippi by marrying a white man. She is a descendant of slaves.

While Barack Obama is not — he is the son of a Kenyan man and a white Kansan woman — his wife, Michelle, is, and so, too, are their daughters, Sasha and Malia. Michelle Obama’s ancestors come from South Carolina; her grandfather was part of the great migration north to Chicago.

Melissa Harris-Lacewell, associate professor of politics and African-American studies at Princeton University, reflected on the Obamas’ forthcoming move: “There are two African-American girls, little girl children, who are going to grow up with 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue as their home address. That’s an astonishing difference for our country. It does not mean the end of racial inequality. It does not mean that most little black girls growing up with their residence on the South Side of Chicago or in Harlem, or Latino boys and girls growing up at their addresses, that the world is all better for them. But it does mean that there is something possible here.”

Construction of the White House started in 1792, with sandstone quarried by slaves in Aquia, Va., then transported up the Potomac River and hauled into place by slaves. The White House Historical Association lists several of the slaves on that historic construction crew: “Tom, Peter, Ben, Harry and Daniel, three of whom were slaves owned by White House architect James Hoban.” Stonecutters, or sawyers, “on government payrolls, such as ‘Jerry,’ Jess,’ ‘Charles,’ ‘Len,’ ‘Dick’, ‘Bill’ and ‘Jim’ undoubtedly were slaves leased from their masters.” Randall Robinson, in his book The Debt, wrote of slave labor in the construction of the U.S. Capitol: “The worn and pitted stones on which the tourists stood had doubtless been hauled into position by slaves, for whom the most arduous of tasks were reserved. They had fired and stacked the bricks. They had mixed the mortar. They had sawn the long timbers in hellishly dangerous pits with one slave out of the pit and another in, often nearly buried alive in sawdust.”

Looking forward, Barack Obama can make history in another way. The executive orders he issues will set the tone of his presidency and could usher in a new era. Human-rights groups are calling for the closing of the Guantanamo prison camp and CIA “black sites,” where torture has been commonplace.

Which brings us back to slavery. When Frederick Douglass, the renowned abolitionist, was young, he was enslaved on a plantation on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, called Mount Misery, owned by Edward Covey, a notorious “slave breaker.” There, physical and psychological torture were standard. That property, today, is owned by Donald Rumsfeld, the former secretary of defense who was one of the key architects of the U.S. military’s program of torture and detention.

With the stroke of a pen on Inauguration Day, President Obama could outlaw torture. It would be a tribute to those slaves who built his new home, the White House, a tribute to those slaves who built the U.S. Capitol Building, a tribute to those who were tortured at Mount Misery.

Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.

Amy Goodman is the host of the nationally syndicated radio news program, Democracy Now!
© 2008 Truthdig All rights reserved.

View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/106960/

Obama’s Opening Moves
By Sean Gonsalves, AlterNet
Posted on November 10, 2008, Printed on November 29, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/106350/

In upstate New York many summers ago, my father introduced me to the game of chess. Our first game went something like this: I moved my white pawn to f3. Dad moved his black pawn to e5. My next move was a “careful” one: pawn to g4. Now if you’re familiar with chess openings, like my Dad was, you can guess his next move. With my king exposed, he moved his queen on a diagonal track to the square next to my powerless pawn (Qh4# 0-1).

“Checkmate!”

My first chess lesson: Opening moves are paramount. A bad start can lead to a quick and sudden endgame.

President-elect Obama comes to the chess board with great expectations. And already the honeymoon is over. As the New York Times noted two days after his election, “No incoming president in modern times has been so pressured to begin governing, in effect, before he is sworn into office.”

In a general 10-move chess opening, there are 169 octillion possibilities. That’s 169 with 27 zeros attached to it — way too many moves to memorize or even think about. That’s why an approach to the game is necessary — if you’re playing to win.

Chess master William Aramil teaches the “five-element” approach — material (value of pieces), time (speed of play), space (how many squares you control), pawn structure, and king safety.

Obama is under pressure to start making moves. But with President Bush still on the clock, it’s a race against time. Aramil says you can gain time by moving minor pieces (a knight or bishop) toward the center of the board.

Who is Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel? Reuters quoted Republican strategist John Feehery saying Emanuel “is going to spend most of his time cracking Democratic heads, getting them to move from the left to the middle.”

Feehery’s assessment seems reasonable given Emanuel’s former position in a centrist Clinton administration and his more recent record as chairman of the 2006 Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, where he recruited and gave campaign funds to pro-Iraq war Dems running against anti-war candidates like Christine Cegelis.

The grandmasters of the game say you move to the center because it gives you the advantage in fighting for space. If your pieces are in the center of the board, they are more mobile and have more options.

“The most common way to achieve more space is through the center … ” Aramil said. “Essentially, the center and space go hand in hand.”

Space for what? The New York Times reports Obama’s advisers are compiling a list of Bush policies that “could be reversed by the executive powers of the new president.”

Over the weekend, one of Barack’s minor pieces, transition team co-chair John Podesta (another centrist Clinton hand) said: “There’s a lot that the president can do using his executive authority without waiting for Congressional action … . He feels like he has a real mandate for change. We need to get off the course that the Bush administration has set.”

Emanuel said: “Rule No. 1: Never allow a crisis to go to waste. They are opportunities to do big things.”

And thanks to Bush, Cheney and a compliant Congress, Obama has inherited the office of the imperial presidency, complete with unprecedented national security powers; not to mention control over the banking industry. Jack Balkin, a constitutional law professor at Yale, says “the next president will enter office as the most powerful president who has ever sat in the White House.”

So Obama is angling to do “big things” — hoping to control as many squares as possible. With Bush playing the first move, a countermove to the center is known in chess as the classical Sicilian defense. It’s a “charge” chess master Aramil says “is a highly popular and excellent choice for those wishing to dive into early struggles or complexities.”

Touche Obama.

Now it’s our turn. If you’re a pawn like me, take heart. “Pawns are the soul of chess.” There’s more of us than any other piece on the board, so we are crucial in determining how the game is played.

Aramil says: “Pawns establish the style, pace, and structure of the opening. Pawns can have lasting effects for the rest of the game.”

Now is the time to mobilize so we can establish the style, pace and structure of Obama’s presidency. The opening has begun.

And while you think about your next move — whether you want to be a sacrificial pawn or “the soul of the game” — pardon me. I gotta go introduce my little Barack to chess.

Sean Gonsalves is a syndicated columnist and news editor with the Cape Cod Times.

© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/106350/

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