SPD support for Angie's Post-Democracy 2.0 plan for Greece

Germany's Social Democratic Party (SPD) is fulfilling the worst stereotypes of itself.

Angie's newly-reported proposal to impose Post-Democracy 2.0 on Greece by putting them under the direct control of a budget czar responsible to the EU (read: Angie) is being criticized by the Green Party and Angie's own coalition partner, the Free Democrats (FDP), although their economic position is more reactionary than Angie's, in general. Florian Toncar, head of the FDP Bundestag caucus, is on board with draconian demands on Greek repayment: "Aber die direkte Anordnung von Sparmaßnahmen durch ausländische Vertreter, vorbei an demokratischen Institutionen des Landes, und das zehn Jahre lang - das wird nicht gehen" ("But the direct regulation of austerity measures by foreign deputies, bypassing the democratic institutions of the country, and that for ten years - that won't work"), he said. (Ralph Bollmann and Markus Wehner, Ein Sparkommissar für Griechenland? Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 28.01.2012)

Sadly, the democracy-hating spirit of Gustav Noske still lives on among some in the SPD

SPD European Member of Parliament Martin Schulz, the President of the European Parliament, supported Angie's Post-Democracy 2.0 demand, showing he has about the same relationship to democratic principles as Thilo Sarrazin. Such is the moral and political corruption that neoliberalism has achieved in the SPD and too many other nominally left parties over the last 20 years. Bollman and Wehner quotes Schulz:

Zustimmend äußerte sich hingegen der Präsident des Europäischen Parlaments, der SPD-Politiker Martin Schulz. „Griechenland wird damit leben müssen, dass diejenigen, die viel Geld für die Sanierung des Landes geben, an Entscheidungen, wie es verteilt wird, maßgeblich beteiligt sind“, sagte Schulz. Das bedeute „sicher eine zeitlich begrenzte Einschränkung der Souveränität“.

[On the other hand, the President of the European Parliament, the SPD politician Martin Schulz, expressed his support. "Greece will have to live with the fact that those who give a lot of money for the rehabilitation of the country, will have a major say in decisions on how it will be used, said Schulz. That means "certain a reduction of sovereignty for a limited time."]

But Schulz isn't just acting as Angie's bitch on this. He goes on to say the EU may have a few extra coins lying around that they could toss to the Greeks to help them out with some growth project or something.

This worthless gasbag is the President of the European Parliament. He deserves the Gustav Noske prize for being a democracy-hating jerk wearing the brand label of Social Democrat.

The Green caucus leader Jürgen Trittin, like Angie a successful politician from the eastern states, dismissed it more on pragmatic grounds than on principle saying it was strictly to satisfy her own grumps in the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and had no chance of being approved by the 27 members of the EU. He seems to assume, reasonably enough, that all 27 EU members including Britain would have to be down with Angie's Greek Post-Democracy 2.0 proposal for it to become official.

So what excuse does Noske disciple Martin Schulz of the SPD have for endorsing this monstrosity of a proposal?

Tags: greece, gustav noske, spd

With another EU summit coming, Angie demands Post-Democracy 2.0 for Greece

The euro, the EU and democracy in Europe will have another dramatic day on Monday at the next EU summit. Angie wants to have agreement coming out of that for all EU countries participating, not just the eurozone, to permanently commit to austerity economics, not only in the current depression but basically forevermore.

This can only go on for so long. What can't work will eventually stop working.

And the sovereign debt crisis goes on, in an acute way. Angie's austerity policies can only make the immediate sovereign debt problem worse.

Economist Nouriel Roubini sees Portugal slipping into a Greek state of crisis, probably needing a writedown of the debt. (Roubini prophezeit Portugal griechische Tragödie Financial Times Deutschland [FTD] 28.01.2012) Portugal's interest rates on their bonds have spiked to clearly unsustainable levels. The Portuguese Prime Minister, who not long ago suggested that unemployed Portuguese citizens should consider emigrating to Brazil or Angola, seems to be hiding his head in the side, perhaps for fear of Angie's wrath.

Speaking at Davos, Roubini suggested that Greece might be leaving the eurozone within a year.

And it turns out that the Princess Angela von Merkel may be ready to impose Post Democracy 2.0 in Greece. According to the Financial Times, Angie wants to basically install a financial dictator representing the euro group (read: Germany) to have final say over the Greek budget and expenditures, with the power to override the democratically-elected government. (Though the current debt-collectors' Post Democratic 1.0 regime in Athens previously imposed by Angie is democratic only in a formal sense.) Peter Spiegel and Kerin Hope report in Call for EU to control Greek budget 01/27/2012:

The German government wants Greece to cede sovereignty over tax and spending decisions to a eurozone “budget commissioner” to secure a second €130bn bail-out, according to a copy of the proposal obtained by the Financial Times.

In what would amount to an extraordinary extension of European Union control over a member state, the new commissioner would have the power to veto budget decisions taken by the Greek government if they were not in line with targets set by international lenders. The new administrator, appointed by other eurozone finance ministers, would take responsibility for overseeing "all major blocks of expenditure" by the Greek government.

"Budget consolidation has to be put under a strict steering and control system," the proposal reads. "Given the disappointing compliance so far, Greece has to accept shifting budgetary sovereignty to the European level for a certain period of time."

Angie has lost it. "It" in this case being her sense for democracy.

And since it is the rightwing parties in Europe who have been working nationalist themes for years in opposition to the European Union, this hands them one more political advantage. What Europe, the European Union and the eurozone need more than anything right now is to get Angie out of the European German Chancellorship. (That was an actual Freudian typo on my part there.)

This is obscene:

Athens would also be forced to adopt a law permanently committing state revenues to debt service "first and foremost". ...

Greek voters have already expressed anger about EU attempts to assist in implementing reforms. Horst Reichenbach, the German national who heads an EU task force to assist Greece, was depicted in German military garb by leftwing Greek newspapers when he arrived last year.

Herr Reichenbach received the un-fond nickname in Greece of Third Reichenbach.

And despite IMF General Manager's criticism of Angie's austerity policies this past week, the IMF is joining with Angie to further impoverish Greece and the Greeks:

Even before Germany circulated its proposal, the EU and International Monetary Fund had presented a 10-page list of "prior actions" Athens must implement before the new bail-out is agreed. According to a copy of the document, also obtained by the FT, Greece must cut an additional 150,000 government jobs within three years.

Not so long ago, it was conventional wisdom that a depression could be a danger to democracy. And here is Germany proposing to set aside another major chunk of the superficial appearance of democracy in Greece for the greed of the banksters. This is just awful. And this to override a government that Angie insisted on installing just a few weeks ago for the main purpose of collecting debts for the banks.

From Angie's proposal itself:

Greece has to legally commit itself to giving absolute priority to future debt service. This commitment has to be legally enshrined by the Greek Parliament. State revenues are to be used first and foremost for debt service, only any remaining revenue may be used to finance primary expenditure. This will reassure public and private creditors that the Hellenic Republic will honour its comittments [sic] after PSI and will positively influence market access. De facto elimination of the possibility of a default would make the threat of a non-disbursement of a GRC II tranche much more credible. If a future tranche is not disbursed, Greece can not threaten its lenders with a default, but will instead have to accept further cuts in primary expenditures as the only possible consequence of any non-disbursement. [my emphasis]

Hungary is not the only country in Europe in which democracy is under immediate threat.

Tags: angela merkel, eu, european union, greece, post-democracy

Hopeful sign from the Obama Administration on financial crime

Even the chronically skeptical Matt Taibbi is hopeful about recent developments in the Obama Administration's approach to financial crime. Matt Taibbi ponders whether Obama's embrace of populist rhetoric is already impacting Wall Street Countdown with Keith Olbermann YouTube date 01/28/2012:



Tags: matt taibbi, obama administration

More on Obama and the SOTU

I don't think either Newt or Willard Romney is Obama's toughest opponent in the 2012 election. It's Angie.

If German Chancellor Angela Merkel keeps successfully pushing through her austerity policies onto other eurozone lands, it's going to make the European recession worse and very possibly set off a new round of financial crises. Those developments could worsen economic conditions in the US, something Obama and the Democrats don't need politically.

This is all the more reason for them to position themselves as advocates for the 99% and as rock-solid defenders of Social Security and Medicare.

Obama's actions have all too often fallen far short of his progressive rhetoric. But it's also true that, after four years and counting of the current economic depression, the national political narrative has clearly shifted in a more progressive direction, focusing on the very real problems of maldistribution of wealth and the serious economic problems affecting millions. Obama's State of the Union (SOTU) address this week certainly reflected that.



As Katrina vanden Heuvel observes in The Occupy Effect The Nation 01/26/2012:

A few short months ago, the corporate media and inside-the-Beltway chatter was all debt and deficits, all the time.

Occupy changed that. It reset the media narrative so it’s more aligned with the true crises of our times—income inequality, downward mobility and economic fairness. It’s also renewed attention to corporate accountability and the corrosive role of corporate money in politics.

We can also question why we're three years into this Administration and still don't have major prosecutions of financial criminals over the actions that brought on the financial crash of 2008. But the fact that a poor settlement that the Justice Department was ready to close with major banks over mortgage issues has been delayed is in itself important. I'm willing to have some hope that the new financial crimes unit will do some real good. Digby writes about Eric Schneidermann and the task force (Ring fencing Hallabaloo 01/26/2012):

The politics suggest to me that while the administration may indeed be trying to "ring-fence" Schneidermann [into being more open to a permissive settlement for the banks], the real purpose is the glaringly obvious: to cover for their failure to settle this. (Isn't the truism in DC that when you can't get something done, form a commission?)The power in that scenario lies exactly where it did before the task force was announced --- with the state AGs, who as far as I can tell are more empowered not less. ... I'm willing to suspend judgment for a while to see if that means Schneidermann is actually a corrupt chameleon who's taken progressives for a wild ride through his entire career in order to sell himself to the highest bidder or whether he believes he can affect this from his perch on the task force.

I don't see this as a sky is falling sort of thing just yet. There are very good reasons to be skeptical and you'd have to be a fool to buy into the premise at face value. But there are worse things than temporarily tabling a bad deal. And there actually are politicians in the world whose self-serving ambitions are dependent upon being perceived as crusaders rather than players. Everything I know of Schneiderman suggests that the former is the path he's chosen.

I guess, for me, it comes down to this: I don't think the administration is nearly as slick as people think and I don't believe that in an election year like this one they will go out of their way to make enemies of their political allies. Everything suggests that they are trying to make at least a rhetorical pivot to a populist(ish) campaign to face the out-of-touch fop, Mitt Romney. It is what it appears to be: plastering lipstick on this pig of a negotiation and pretending they have a path to a cheap settlement in order to keep both the banks and the people on the hook through the election. They are not working with a strong hand.

And she's very right in saying that progressives don't have to back a third party to make a real, constructive impact in this situation: "Even if activists eventually vote for the president, they can cause huge headaches for the campaign in an election year, particularly in individual states. This is when they have maximum leverage and they should use it."

Then there's the military part of his speech, which contained both the strengths and the problems of his foreign policy. Threatening war against Iran is not a good thing.

But he also put on display the problems of the idolatry toward the military that has become a chronic condition of American politics. Our soldiers deserve praise for serving and for doing their jobs well. But all our soldiers and generals are subject to the law and to the critical judgment of the citizenry and their elected representatives.

Charlie Pierce wrote, "Some of the president's base is not going to be happy with a lot of the speech; I'm not overjoyed with the saber-rattling over Iran, or the notion that the American political system is basically supposed to be Seal Team 6." (The State of the Union and a Would-Be 99% Nominee Esquire Politics Blog 01/25/2012) The passage to which he referred was toward the end, where Obama held up the Seals mission that killed Osama bin Laden as some kind of general model for conduct in America: "All that mattered that day was the mission. No one thought about politics. No one thought about themselves."

Obama was probably hoping for not just a feel-good vibe but also making another pitch in his endless and hopeless case to appeal to Republicans and conservatives who hate his guts, even when they actually agree with much of his foreign and military policy, including especially the most dubious parts like targeted assassinations.

Laura Flanders (Not A Peep About President's Praise for War CommonDreams.org 01/26/2012) points to another complication of holding up soldiers and the military as a general model of good citizenship in civilian society:

Speaking of the troops, President Obama began: "At a time when too many of our institutions have let us down, they exceed all expectations."

Post-show pundits on cable news praised the president's comfort with his commander-in-chief role but none saw fit to mention recent news -- of marines urinating on Afghan corpses, say, or Staff Sgt Wuterich walking free after participating in the killing of 24 unarmed men, women and children in Haditha, Iraq. Accompanying Obama's next phrase, "Imagine what we could accomplish if we followed their example," no one thus far has played vile viral video. The critics have been kind.

And even if there hadn't been so many reports of these kinds of crimes, the whole notion that politics or Congress or the country in general should operate like a small military combat team acting under orders and executing a very specific mission.

This is Obama's "post-partisan" side talking. And his metaphor illustrates how unrealistic that perspective is. We have political differences because people have different interests and different points of view. Some of the worst decisions in American history, like the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act, suffered because of too little debate and discussion and disagreement, not from too much.

It's a very inappropriate metaphor for the proper function of democracy.

Finally, Robert Scheer has a good column on the neoliberal assumptions showing in Obama's SOTU, Obama’s Faux Populism Sounds Like Bill Clinton TruthDig 01/26/2012. I plan to comment on it more in a later post.

Tags: 2012 election, barack obama

Europa special(s), including Umberto Eco

Six European newspapers published special sections on Europe, i.e., the European Union. It's notable that the occasion for this special coordinated event is an interview with Angie on the European crisis.

The six are:

Gazeta Wyborcza (Poland)

The Guardian (UK)

Le Monde (France)

El País (Spain)

La Stampa (Italy)

Süddeutsche Zeitung (Germany)

The Guardian has this piece: Umberto Eco: 'It's culture, not war, that cements European identity' 01/26/2012. This is an interesting observation:

Asked to describe European identity in 2012, Eco says it is widespread but "shallow". "I am using an English word that is not the same as the Italian word superficiale, but which is somewhere between 'surface' and 'deep'. We must change this, before the crisis strips it [Europe] of everything.

"The university exchange programme Erasmus is barely mentioned in the business sections of newspapers, yet Erasmus has created the first generation of young Europeans. I call it a sexual revolution: a young Catalan man meets a Flemish girl – they fall in love, they get married and they become European, as do their children. The Erasmus idea should be compulsory – not just for students, but also for taxi drivers, plumbers and other workers. By this, I mean they need to spend time in other countries within the European Union; they should integrate."

Eco's wife is German, he's Italian. He speaks from experience.

I also found this observation of his intriguing:

"... Or does the problem [of European identity] go back to God - the fact that the United States becomes ever more religious as Europe becomes even less religious?

"That's the way it is. Back when Pope Wojtyla was still alive, there was much discussion on whether they should accept the European constitution and the continent's Christian roots. Secular people predominated and they did nothing about it. The church protested. There was however a third way, more difficult, but one that would give us strength today.

And that would have been to speak of the constitution of all our roots – the Greek-Roman, the Judaic and the Christian. In our past, we have both Venus and the crucifix, the Bible and Nordic mythology, which we remember with Christmas trees, or with the many festivals of St Lucy, St Nicolas and Santa Claus. Europe is a continent that was able to fuse many identities, and yet not confuse them.

That is precisely how I see its future. As for religion: be careful. Many people who no longer go to church end up falling prey to supersitition [sic]. And many who are non-practising still carry around a little saint card with a picture of Padre Pio in their wallets!"

Padre Pio was one of Pope John Paul II's more controversial canonizations, a guy who promoted a notably superstitious version of Catholicism.

Tags: angela merkel, european union

Malvinas/Falkland Islands dispute

Britain and Argentina have been having a diplomatic flap the last few weeks over the Malvinas Islands, occupied by Britain since the 19th century, but legitimately claimed by Argentina as their territory. Britain calls them the Falkland Islands.

Argentine President Christina Feranández responds to British Prime Minister Cameron's latest provocative comments on the dispute (Kirchner slams Cameron comments as 'nonsense' 01/26/2012):



This is a Spanish-language report from TV Publica Argentina on the same topic (Reclamo de diálogo por Malvinas 01/26/2012):



Tags: argentina, cristina fernández, malvinas

EU: Angie's counteroffensive

Angie's been taking some flak for her austerity policies from high places. IMF Managing Director Cristine Lagarde came down hard on her in Berlin. The head of the World Bank, Robert Zeollick is also pressing her from a different point of view to take a more realistic view of the euro crisis in the context of the new European recession (Weltbank-Boss verlangt mehr Führung von Merkel Spiegel Online 25.01.2012) Luxembourg's Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn made a surprisingly blunt set of criticisms of Angie's handling of the euro crisis. (Hans-Jürgen Schlamp, Luxemburgs Außenminister."Merkels Fiskalpakt wird nicht funktionieren" Spiegel Online 25.01.2012)

Asselborn called Angie's fiscal pact that next week's summit is supposed to agree on, a "waste of time and energy." He warned about nationalist tones in attacks on the EU. He didn't specifically mention Germany in this regard, but the remark plainly applies to the sneering tone Angie and taken and encouraged in talking about the moral failings of countries that have come under pressure from bond speculators.

Expressing concern about the declining public confidence in the EU, there wasn't much doubt about who he blames: "Es sind vor allem die Regierungen großer EU-Länder, die ihre eigenen Interessen oft radikal durchsetzen." ("It is above all the governments of the larger EU countries that often push through their own interests in a radical way.") He criticizes Angie for letting internal German politics play too big a role in her approach to the eurozone crisis. Britain, France, Angie: he's talking about you. He compares the current "Merkozy" German-French push for a fiscal pact done as a separate treaty from the EU as such to the creation of an "alliance of the willing", a reference to Bush's notorious bullying of European countries to support the Iraq War.

That's really cold in European terms, comparing Angie to Bush. But I actually think it's accurate in that Angie seems to have been impressed with Cheney's and Bush's approach to creating their Coalition of the Willing, aka, the Coalition of the Billing, since most of them got some kind of financial kickback benefit in return for their nominal participation.

Asselborn objects to the EU-minus-one treaty on basically technical legal grounds, rather than on the foolishness of its basic assumption that writing deficit and debt limits into national constitutions would somehow fix the current eurozone debt problem or new ones in the future. But he's clearly saying it's useless, which I'm sure bugs the Princess Angie von Merkel to hear.

Non-eurozone EU member Poland's Prime Minister Donald Tusk is also grumbling about not being involved enough in the decision-making process and publicly expressed reservations about Poland's approval of the agreement. Some of this may be posturing before the summit. But Angie doesn't like people questioning her orders.

There's lots of pressure, especially from Italy but also from other places like Austria to boost the amount of funding to the eurozone emergency funds (EFSF and ESM)

Now Angie is doing a public relations offensive leading up to next Monday's EU summit, as Stefan Kornelius reports in Merkel will Europas Wirtschaft ankurbeln Süddeutsche Zeitung 25.01.2012.

She apparently sees the need to at least verbally acknowledge the need for jobs and growth. (Duh!) But she still seems fixed on her austerity course for the EU countries, complete with her standard lectures to lesser peoples other EU countries about the need to take responsibility. And she repeats her demand for "labor market flexibility", aka, lower wages, weaker unions, lower benefits. She brushes aware criticism about Germany's dominant role, telling her critics in fellow EU countries to just shut the hell up that while she takes their criticism seriously [cough, choke] there's nothing to them. Oh, and stop asking us for money.

And, Madame Lagarde, you know those eurobonds you were lecturing me about: fuggitaboutit.

Her idea for stimulus is to have some EU funds provide for subsidies to various businesses, a typical neoliberal prescription likely to have next to no stimulative effect in the short run.

Apparently, we don't get to see the full interview until Thursday's papers.

Speaking at the Davos Forum, she told the one-percenters there that, heck, no one should expect quick improvement. Her austerity economics will take another year, year-and-a-half at least to show any results. (J. Eigendorf et al, Angela Merkel beschwört die Solidarität der Europäer Welt Online 25.01.2012)

That Angie is a real piece of work.

Tags: angela merkel, eu, euro, european union

Dems to aggressively wrong-foot Republicans?

After the experience of the last three years, this is a bit difficult to imagine. But if it does happen, belief in miracles is likely to surge among Democratic base voters: Brian Beutler, Senate Democrats Plan To Put Republicans On The Wrong Side Of The Middle Class TPM 01/25/2012

Senate Democrats are preparing an aggressive legislative agenda to complement the vision President Obama outlined in his State of the Union Address. The goal is to test the idea that the public supports an agenda of aggressive federal action on behalf of the middle class, and that Republicans are locked in a pattern of reactionary opposition, even to popular policies.

The push is premised on the notion that the country has turned the corner on the fights over deficits and the size of government, and that keeping issues of equity and opportunity for the middle class at the center of the national debate will redound to Democrats' political benefit, either by breaking the GOP or by putting them on the wrong side of public opinion.

One of my Facebook friends said that she kept having the feeling while watching Obama's State of the Union address Tuesday, "where have you been the past three years?". And that's kind of my reaction to this.

But Harry Reid showed on abolishing "don't ask, don't tell" and on his push for the Dream Act that he can actually do this well. So I hope they're serious about this.

One of the big political faults of the Obama Administration that caused political problems for him time after time is that he tried to avoid doing just this: going for a full Democratic proposal and seriously fight for, knowing that might lose, or that it could wind up with a compromise that didn't give the Republicans 95% of what they wanted on the deal. The Republicans' willingness to fight and lose on issues important to their narrative and messaging has been a big advantage for them.

Although the part I'm bolding in the following gave me a quick sinking feeling in my stomach:

Congress will first have to clear its plate of the payroll tax cut issue, and other key measures that expire at the end of February. But after that Senate Democrats plan a relentless push on issues with overwhelming public support, knowing full well Republicans have left themselves little space to work with Democrats, and lack the leverage or the positive agenda they'd need to change the subject.

But the payroll tax reduction extension - which has its own problems as policy but those won't be at issue in that fight - itself will be an important moment. The Republicans are almost certain to play chicken with Obama and the Dems over it like they recently did. And if he winds up stumbling along trying various compromise proposals the Reps will inevitably reject, he'll damage his own and the Democrats' messaging yet again before they get to the "after that".

But if they can dodge that bullet - a big if - this sounds right to me:

"We intend to test this theory out by pursuing major chunks of the President's middle class agenda. We’re going to push serious proposals to help create middle class jobs. We're going to defend Medicare. And we will pursue tax reform that makes sense for the middle class," [Sen. Chuck] Schumer said.

Go for it, Dems!

Tags: 2012 election, barack obama, democratic party

Obama's SOTU speech and the inside-outside progressive movement

Pundits will have lots of fun dissecting Obama's Tuesday SOTU speech. The Washington Post has the prepared transcript posted.

The most significant thing about it to me is that it represents the results of the inside-outside effects of the current progressive movement on the Democratic policy. Obama's critical posture toward one-percenters who export American jobs and law-breaking banksters is a result of the Occupy movement. They really did change the political narrative of the mainstream. It's not that Occupy came out of the blue. But they caught the imagination of enough of the public three years into this depression to resonate widely with popular frustration and anger toward the 1% and their destructive misdeeds.

As a campaign speech, it sounds good. Howie Klein, who's not in the habit of being overly generous to the President's partisanship, tweeted, "I bet every Democrat running for Congress in November is feeling pretty good right now. Republicans must want to kill themselves." (I can't see in Twitter's current configuration how to link to an individual tweet.)

Since voters generally see Presidential elections as a binomial choice between the Democratic candidate and the Republican, Obama's framing in the SOTU, this seems to me to be a decent way for Obama to position himself distinctly on the pro-labor, pro-consumer, pro-99% of the binomial divide. I found his description of the bankruptcy and reconstruction of General Motors to be very effective in that regard. I've always seen that as one of his most sensible and progressive measures, and one which presented a clear contrast to the Republicans, who generally wanted to let GM collapse completely in order to weaken the United Auto Workers union.

On the tactical aspect, Democrats do have reason to be concerned about Obama's post-partisan posturing, which has him pepper-spraying his own most impressive presentations that draw a sharp contrast to the Republicans. For instance, he formulated the event that damaged him greatly in the eyes of independents because of his compromising this way: "The greatest blow to confidence in our economy last year didn't come from events beyond our control. It came from a debate in Washington over whether the United States would pay its bills or not. Who benefited from that fiasco?"

This is classic Obama bipartisanship talk: "Washington" is the problem, not the fact that the Republicans are a wrecker party running a strategy of fundamental opposition and obstructionism to Obama's main domestic agenda.

None of the stream of tweets I saw during the speech called out this line, though: "As I told the Speaker this summer, I’m prepared to make more reforms that rein in the long term costs of Medicare and Medicaid, and strengthen Social Security, so long as those programs remain a guarantee of security for seniors." Why, why, why would Obama or any Democrat think that cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits is good politics? He's referring to the part of "that fiasco" in which the Administration offered the Republicans a deal involving cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits. He may get lucky and have the punditocracy ignore it. But that is bad, bad politics and terrible policy. Bernie Sanders did pick up on it and said clearly it was a bad idea on MSNBC afterwards.

I would also note that the policies Obama did specify were largely the standard "left" version of the neoliberal menu that Jamie Galbraith described in 1996 which avoids macroeconomic policy aimed specifically at creating jobs, instead relying on more passive supply-side and so-called business friendly policies: tax cuts to reward desired behavior, education and training, "infrastructure" justified for its benefits for private business, subsidies for emerging technologies not yet developed to the point that private companies can make bundles of money on them.

And emphasizing how he's supposedly cut regulations and opening up more deep-sea oil drilling plays very much to the Republican master narrative on government and the economy. He even dredged up the basically phony Republican point about regulations on milk spills.

And he did threaten war against Iran: "America is determined to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and I will take no options off the table to achieve that goal." It's awful policy, though given the current state of politics in which the main criticism of US interventionism that is part of the Presidential campaign is the segregationist-Bircher crackpot Papa Doc Paul, it's probably good politics to defend against the inevitable Republican charges that he's "weak" and "soft" on foreign policy.

War is not a good thing.

Tags: 2012 election, barack obama, state of the union 2012

Ryan Lizza and "the Obama memos"

Ryan Lizza's The Obama Memos: The making of a post-post-partisan Presidency New Yorker 01/30/2012 is the kind of insider-baseball story that our punditocracy loves.

And it's an interesting story in its own right. Not least because it gives us a sense of the White House's preferred pitch to the Democratic base.

The pitch isn't too inspiring, though. There's an awful lot of gee, what can a President get done anyway? They (or just Rizza?) oddly invoke Harry Truman as a witness to that fact:

Obama was learning the same lesson of many previous occupants of the Oval Office: he didn’t have the power that one might think he had. Harry Truman, one in a long line of Commanders-in-Chief frustrated by the limits of the office, once complained that the President "has to take all sorts of abuse from liars and demagogues. ... The people can never understand why the President does not use his supposedly great power to make ’em behave. Well, all the President is, is a glorified public relations man who spends his time flattering, kissing and kicking people to get them to do what they are supposed to do anyway."

Ironically, what the Truman quote conveys is that Truman was a President who put a great deal of effort into "flattering, kissing and kicking people" to get his proposals passed.

And in the famous give-'em-hell election of 1948, Truman used the Presidential campaign to aggressively blame the Republicans for their obstructionism. The White House operatives who talked to Lizza may be trying to convey that Obama now realizes he has to do that. But I'll believe it when I see it.

The Obama team's version of the Truman strategy so far, and I believe we see it repeated in this article, is more along the lines of, "Golly heck, we thought the Republicans were going to be all bipartisan and helpful and stuff. And, shoot, it's not our fault that they weren't quite like that. Who could have guessed?" Not exactly the Truman pitch.

This following version of the gee-what-can-a-President-do argument I find particularly silly. Already by the end of 2009, Obama was preparing to strike a more conservative note in 2010. Lizza writes:

Axelrod and other Obama political advisers saw anti-Keynesian rhetoric as a political necessity. They believed it was better to channel the anti-government winds than to fight them. As much as it enraged Romer and outside economists, the White House was on to something. A President's ability to change public opinion through rhetoric is extremely limited. George Edwards, after studying the successes of Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Ronald Reagan, concluded that their communications skills contributed almost nothing to their legislative victories. According to his study, "Presidents cannot reliably persuade the public to support their policies” and “are unlikely to change public opinion." [my emphasis]

Wow, that's good to know. That means the Iraq War never happened. After all, it was a wild and totally unnecessary idea, and President Bush had only "extremely limited" ability to sway public opinion!

I don't know which is sillier. That the White House would suggest such a thing (if they did), or that Lizza would write it down as though it's an undisputed social science fact. What it is, is a laughable excuse. The George Edwards to whom he refers is the author of On Deaf Ears: The Limits of the Bully Pulpit (2003). His argument sounds very much like an academic attempt at originality that failed. He's reduced in the book to making arguments like this to sustain his conclusion:

Presidents, even those skilled in the rhetorical arts, are unlikely to be directors of change, reshaping the political landscape to pave the way for change. Instead, they are facilitators, whose greatest skill is recognizing and exploiting opportunities for change in their environment. Being a facilitator rather than a director of change has advantages, however. Following rather than molding public opinion makes presidents and their staffs attuned to how issues resonate with the public and thus the potential for exploiting public support to bring about change. [my emphasis]

In a formulation like this, it's hard to see any substantive difference between a President being a facilitator rather than a director of public opinion change. But even with this argument, the candidate who campaigned for Change in 2008 should presumably have been a great position for "for exploiting public support to bring about change." As Christine Lagarde said in her Berlin speech this week, quoting Hippocrates, "Healing is a matter of time, but it is sometimes also a matter of opportunity." Opportunities pass, and spending three years hoping for a conversion of the Republican Party to bipartisanship on domestic issues was a tremendous waste of opportunity.

In fact, Edwards even makes the case that a President normally has maximum opportunity to be a change facilitator in the early part of a Presidency when the Presidential party has a solid majority in Congress. So even Edwards' flawed conclusions would suggest that Obama should have made a maximum push for his programs at the first of his Presidency. And maybe he did. Maybe he pushed for all he really wanted.

Edwards' argument that Presidents can't further their legislative agenda through a public communications strategy is also heavily based on the ideal of bipartisan compromise. Aggressive public messaging could make the other side angry and make them less likely to compromise and so endangers the President's agenda. Again: Bush, Iraq War.

Lizza, writing about 2009 after the initial stimulus was passed, reports:

Through the rest of 2009, as the anti-government Tea Party movement gathered strength, and conservative voters began to speak of creeping American socialism, Obama’s aides quarrelled over how the President should respond. [Economic adviser Christina] Romer wanted him to press the Keynesian case for his policies—to defend the proposition of increased government spending to fight the recession. Orszag argued that he needed more support from Washington’s deficit hawks, and urged him to create a deficit commission, partly because "it can provide fiscal credibility during a period in which it is unlikely we would succeed in enacting legislation."

It presented Obama with a common Presidential dilemma: Should he use the White House bully pulpit to change minds or should he accept popular opinion? He chose the latter. In his speeches, he began saying, "Americans are making hard choices in their budgets. We’ve got to tighten our belts in Washington, as well." Romer fought to get such lines removed from his speeches, arguing that it was “exactly the wrong policy." She thought the President should emphasize that the government would seek to use taxpayer money wisely, and leave it at that. Instead, he seemed to be accepting the Republican case against stimulus and for austerity. She thought he was losing faith in Keynesianism itself. [my emphasis]

Rizza reports it as a communication strategy. On that score, Romer was very right. Accepting the facile analogy of the federal budgets to family budgets - how many families have their own currency, to name just one of the absurdities of such a comparison - Obama conceded and generally promoting austerity notions that went along with it mainly reinforced the Republicans' push to limit economic growth and undermine Social Security and Medicare.

I also don't believe that it was just a communication strategy. The last three years have given us a lot of evidence that Obama, like way too many Democrats in Congress, actually worry seriously about deficits. The Republicans claim to, especially when there's a Democratic President in office. But I'll believe that there may be a Republican somewhere that actually cares about the deficit when I see Republicans in Congress during a Republican Administration insist on raising taxes for the wealthiest Americans in order to fund the increases in military spending they always demand.

It seems more likely that Obama say the situation in early 2009 as an emergency requiring extraordinary measures that normally were undesirable. To the extent he believes in affirmative government at all, it seems to be limited to the standard, timid neoliberal approach of the New Keynesians in the 1990s: do education and training, build infrastructure in the name of making the private sector more "competitive" in the world, subsidize developing technologies that are not far enough along for private companies to make a bundle off them yet.

Tags: 2012 election, barack obama

Recent installments in the fall of the European Union

Spiegel Online reports on IMF chief Christine Lagarde's speech in Berlin criticizing German Chancellor Merkel's approach to the European economic and currency crisis: Stefan Kaiser, Madame Oui liest Merkel die Leviten 23.01.2012. The article also comments on the ways Angie's recklessness is isolating Germany in world opinion. They also talk about Lagarde's private meeting with Angie on Sunday, where the areas of agreement were evidently so small that they didn't even issue a standard joint statement afterward talking about their "frank discussions" or whatever other euphemism they might have chosen.

The IMF claims that Spain may face sovereign debt default if Angie doesn't allow the boosting of emergency bailout funds for eurozone sovereign debt: Juan Gómez El FMI ve riesgo de "crisis de solvencia" en España si no se amplía el fondo de rescate El País 23.01.2012.

Plus, the Spanish economy is shrinking, while the new conservative government applies even more severe austerity measures than the previous Socialist government did: Alejandro Bolaños, El Banco de España augura una recesión del 1,5% en 2012 El País 23.01.2012.

Greece is trying to get its private creditors to accept reality and take a sufficient default that will get Greece's debt down to something much closer to a sustainable level: Daniel Flynn and Gernot Heller, Germany, France press for rapid Greek debt deal Reuters 01/23/2012:

Sources close to the talks told Reuters on Monday that the impasse centred on questions of whether the deal would return Greece's debt mountain, currently over 350 billion euros (293 billion pounds), to levels that European governments believe are sustainable.

"There will likely be an updated debt sustainability analysis that will be discussed at the Eurogroup," a banking source in Athens said, requesting anonymity. "Talks will continue this week. The aim is to have an agreement by late next Monday." ...

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said there was no question of extending Greece a bridging loan if talks with the private sector dragged on further.

The euro pushed up to its highest level against the dollar in nearly three weeks on hopes Greece and the banks could overcome differences and seal a successful debt swap.

A cheery headline from the Irish Examiner: Troika warns of financial ‘bomb’ in Dublin by Paul O’Brien 01/23/2012. This has to do with payment to bondholders of the former Anglo bank, now owned by the Irish government and called IBRC:

Anglo, now known as IBRC, is due to repay €1.25 billion to bondholders on Wednesday and Transport Minister Leo Varadkar said householders would suffer if it didn’t.

Mr Varadkar said any decision to burn bondholders would impact on Ireland’s reputation, increase borrowing costs for banks and semi-state companies, and ultimately lead to higher mortgages and household bills.

He said the troika of EC, ECB and IMF, which is supplying Ireland’s bailout loans, had issued a stark warning to the Government about the consequences of IBRC not repaying the money.

"What they’ve said really is that: 'It's on your head. We don't want you to default on these payments. It is your decision ultimately. But a bomb will go off, and the bomb will go off in Dublin, not in Frankfurt.'"

Organized labor is raising a stink over this particular issue:

But Paul Sweeney, chief economist at the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, described the minister’s claims as "nonsense", while Independent TD Finian McGrath said the public did not want to see the bondholders repaid and it was time for the Government to "stare down" the ECB.

It’s not just trade unions and opposition figures who have urged the Government to burn the bondholders. Fine Gael TD Peter Mathews last week secured Dáil time to make his case for halting Wednesday’s repayment, saying Ireland was now "at a moral crossroads".

It's good to see resistance from labor to the dictates of the "troika" demanding that public policy cater to the 1% at the expense of everyone else.

Another piece from the Irish Examiner, this one likely to cause heart palpitations among American Republicans if they saw it: Elffie Chew, Ireland may be first EU state to sell Islamic bond 01/20/2012.

Tags: eu, euro, european union

Christine vs. Angie

You can't say women are running the global economy these days. But German Chancellor Angela Merkel and IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde are certainly two key players in international finance right now.

Lagarde comes down pretty hard on Merkel's "ordoliberal" austerity policies in her message Global Challenges in 2012 (prepared remarks) 01/23/2012.

One of my former professors always made a reference to "my good friend so-and-so" if he was about to rake that particular "good friend" across the coals. Legarde opens with a reference to "my good and highly-respected friends Chancellor Merkel and Minister Schäuble", so you know it's going to be bad.

This presentation takes off from IMF findings that will be released Tuesday which, in Lagarde's words, "will lower growth forecasts for most parts of the world. Even these lower forecasts assume a constructive policy path that is by no means assured."

And she gives a sobering reminder that not so long ago would have seemed commonplace, that a depression can really screw a lot of things up. But in our real existing depression, our ruling elites in Europe and the US seem to have forgotten that to an astonishing extent, to a 1914-level-of-dysfunction extent:

Yet before we indulge in yet another bout of collective pessimism, which is becoming something of a global sport, let me ask a simple question—why did 2011 turn out so badly?

I would argue that it was not because of any fresh wound to the global economy. No, it was driven instead by a lack of a collective determination to reach a cooperative solution. We saw many false starts and half measures in 2011 — in Europe, but also, for instance, in the United States with its debt ceiling debacle.

Put simply, policymakers let an old wound fester, and in doing so made the situation worse.

Looking at it from this perspective, 2012 must be a year of healing. But as Hippocrates put it long ago: "Healing is a matter of time, but it is sometimes also a matter of opportunity".

And today, it has to be an opportunity of our making. Otherwise, we could easily slide into a "1930s moment". A moment where trust and cooperation break down and countries turn inward. A moment, ultimately, leading to a downward spiral that could engulf the entire world.

Now when an IMF head starts talking 1930s gloom-and-doom, my first instinct is to think, oh, here comes a pitch for deregulation and letting banksters run wild.

But that's not what Legrande does here. She of the creation of the the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) and its upcoming successor the European Stability Mechanism (the ESM), "only two years ago, this was heresy". (Yes, by the time we all learn the initials EFSF, they'll change to ESM.) Her comments are made in a fusion of diplomat-speak and bankerese. But she is encouraging policies that are still considered heretical by Angie and and the German banking Establishment.

She argues for expansionary budget and spending policies in the better-off countries to stimulate the economies of the so-called periphery like Greece and Spain; boosting the resources of the EFSF and folding it more quickly than planned into the ESM; addressing the problem of bank undercapitalization head-on; and, the creation of eurobonds or their functional equivalent. She observes that Europe "is at the epicenter of the current crisis and thus key to the global outlook."

She also pushes the Obama Administration for more mortgage relief, though she tosses in a bit of the tired and misguided conventional wisdom about bringing down the public debt. But in the section on the US, she makes this statement that also seems to be a whack at Herbert Hoover economics in Europe:

This brings me to another worrisome tendency in many quarters—to view fiscal policy as a morality play between profligacy and responsibility. Political and market commentary is too often cast in these terms. Yet markets themselves have been schizophrenic about fiscal tightening, at times rewarding it with lower interest rates, and at other times recoiling at the implied growth slowdown and pushing up interest rates.

That's exactly the perspective of Angie's "ordoliberalism", and it has promoted a retrograde, nationalist outlook in Germany toward other European countries.

And I wish this were the actual perspective of the current American President:

One more point: We must not let financial regulation slip off the policy agenda. We simply cannot carry on with the financial sector that gave us the global financial crisis. We need a safer and more stable financial system, one that serves rather than destabilizes the real economy. While policymakers have made a lot of progress, they still need to complete the reform agenda and ensure that the new standards are implemented in a way that is consistent across countries. [my emphasis]

And these remarks at the end are clearly directed toward Bundeskanzlerin Merkel in particular:

But what we must all understand is that this is a defining moment. It is not about saving any one country or region. It is about saving the world from a downward economic spiral. It is about avoiding a 1930s moment, in which inaction, insularity, and rigid ideology combine to cause a collapse in global demand.

The longer we wait, the worse it will get. The only solution is to move forward together. Our collective economic future depends on it.

More than most, Germany understands the virtues of determined solidarity. Through its experiences with its Soziale Marktwirtschaft and unification, it showed what can be accomplished by bringing everybody together in service of the common good. The world needs a strong leadership role from Germany today, and it is Germany’s core interest to provide such a role.

Let me end with a quote from Goethe: "It is not enough to know, we must apply. It is not enough to will, we must do." (Es ist nicht genug, zu wissen, man muß auch anwenden; es ist nicht genug, zu wollen, man muß auch tun). This is the challenge of our year ahead.

Translation: Angie, it's time to get real, now!

Tags: angela merkel, christine lagarde, world economic crisis

Michelle Goldberg on the Presidential race

Michelle Goldberg has a good understanding for the patterns of Christian Right thinking. Which means she also has a good insight into Republican base voter thinking, because they are basically identical with the Christian Right, which is largely the same as the Tea Party. So her commentary on the President election could be particularly interesting this year.

She looks at the Newt's culture-war campaign in South Carolina in Newt’s Winning Formula: He Does Scorn and Disgust Better Than Anyone Daily Beast 01/210/2012. She writes:

Last night was a resounding victory for disdain. Gingrich may be a sexual hypocrite, an erratic leader, and a cosseted lobbyist masquerading as a scrappy insurgent, but he is an absolute maestro of contempt, and that is what South Carolina wanted.

Look at what turned his electoral fortunes around. It had little to do with his attack on Mitt Romney's record at Bain Capital. I didn't meet anyone in South Carolina, including Gingrich supporters, who had anything negative to say about Romney's business record. Instead, the race turned in Gingrich’s favor during the debate on Monday, when Juan Williams asked him whether it might be "insulting" to black Americans to say they should demand jobs and not food stamps, and that poor kids should be put to work as janitors. Gingrich, puffed up with righteousness, went on the offensive. To the crowd, he seemed to be putting Williams in his place. No doubt their hearts pulsed as they imagined him doing the same to Obama. [my emphasis]

Reporting on her encounters with staff and supporters in South Carolina is anecdotal, of course. But Michelle actually knows what to listen for, as she showed in her book Kingdom Comin: The Rise of Christian Nationalism (2006). She's not like Tom Friedman running into cab drivers all over the world who happen to agree with exactly what Tommy Friedman is thinking about a particular subject at the moment.

I haven't seen any polling that gets at the subject. But I suspect that the attack on Willard's business practices may reinforce Newt's segregationist culture-war message more than Michelle's interviews are indicating. Because to make the white victimization theme work in connection with economic policies that are intended to give one-percenters like Willard even more wealth and more latitude to do what they do, no matter how damaging it is to the community at large, the Republicans need to cast the enemy of the moment as a wealthy, out-of-touch elitist. One of the services neoconservatives provided to building the current Republican coalition was to articulate and create images that substituted academics, gubment "bureaucrats" and liberal politicians for the image of the fat-and-happy plutocrat feeding on the misery of the people.

But since Newt has an actual plutocrat like Willard to run against, his campaign is using some of the same political imagery the plutocrat George W. Bush, part of one of the richest and most influential families in the United States, used in 2004 against John Kerry.

In other words, it difficult to disentangle negative class images of the wealthy from the culture-war appeals. After all, the entire Republican political project is about getting large number of working people to vote for economic policies that damage their own interests. And to exploit the opportunity the depression and Obama's relatively tepid response to it, the Republicans need to find a way to exploit class frustrations to win votes for an agenda that is entirely directed at comforting the already very comfortable.

Here's a video she did recently, basically warning against third-party illusions on the part of progressives. It's slickly produced, although the way they have her looking off to the side is unfortunately a bit reminiscent of Michele Bachmann's notorious response to last year's State of the Union address - though definitely without the Faraway Eyes:



This appeared at the Daily Beast's controversial Andrew Sullivan article How Obama's Long Game Will Outsmart His Critics 01/16/2012. The first minute and a half has a bit too much blame-the-hippies outlook for my taste. But then she goes into a useful reflection about how the Christian Right got the power within the Republican Party that they came to enjoy.

Tags: 2012 election, michelle goldberg, newt gingrich, segregation, white racism

Newt takes South Carolina with culture war campaign

Here's Newt Gingrich's South Carolina Primary Victory Speech, the whole thing from PBS Newshour 01/21/2012:



He strikes a real culture war posture here.

Ben Adler writes about this emphasis in his campaign Cultural Populism Catapults Gingrich to South Carolina Victory The Nation 01/21/2012

The moment that most struck me in Newt's speech is just after 7:55 when he praises Ron "Papa Doc" Paul, who, said Newt, "on the issue of money and the Federal Reserve has been right for 25 years." Say what?! Does Newt want to put the US back on the gold standard? Does he want to abolish the Federal Reserve? Is he making a full embrace of John Birch Society economics here? Newt even used the goldbug term "fiat money", a legitimate term around which the Bircher types like to wrap all kinds of bizarre notions. I figured when I saw Charles Krauthammer's column normalizing Papa Doc that overt Bircherism is more acceptable in the Republican Party tha n it ever has been. I'd be happy to see it turn out like 1964. But overt Bircherism wasn't welcome in the Republican Party in 1964. And FOX News wasn't even yet a gleam in Roger Ailes' eye.

Michael Tomasky describes some of how Newt's segregationist/culture-war talk resonated with the South Carolina Republicans, still angrily carrying on the political tradition of John Calhoun (Newt’s Fury Triumphs in South Carolina Primary Daily Beast 01/21/2012):

How and why? Simply, the debates. Even more simply, the two Moments in the debates: the smackdown of Juan Williams, and the smackdown of John King for starting the second debate by asking about his ex-wife's allegations. There is no question that Gingrich rode those two moments to victory.

In other words: He won by hatin' on the black guy and the liberal media. He hated on them expertly. He fired synapses in conservatives' brains that they barely knew were there. You knew, anyone knew, watching those two moments, that they were absolutely pivotal. It wasn't Newt's ideas. Raise your hand if you think his plan to create local citizens' boards to confer citizenship designations on undocumented immigrants made Tea Partiers across the state sit down over dinner and say, "You know, darlin', I'm really impressed with Newt’s civic-minded immigration ideas." Hands? Thought so.

The segregationist rhetoric will get the Republican base out to the polls, along with organizational help from the Christian Right's get-out-the-vote network. Newt's hard-edged radicalism is a big reason he has such huge negatives.

But I'm definitely restraining my enthusiasm for seeing Newt surging in Republican race because right now he looks like a weaker candidate than Willard Romney against Obama. Lots of Democrats thought the same thing about Ronald Reagan in 1980 against Jimmy Carter. And it wasn't until fairly late in the race in 1980 that Reagan took a clear lead.

The Republican candidate whether it's Willard or Newt, has some definite advantages. We're in a depression with high unemployment and a real possibility for a new recession. And this is the first Citizen's United Presidential election and corporate political spending is already soaring. For a description of what's happening o the latter, see George Zornick, Eleven Shocking Facts About Campaign Finance The Nation 01/21/2012.

Then there's the Democratic candidate. Obama can't seem to give even an inspiring partisan speech without pepper-spraying his own message by talking about bipartisanship or balancing the budget or cutting "entitlements", i.e., Social Security and Medicare. All major factors, unfortunately. How he frames things in the upcoming State of the Union (SOTU, to political junkies) address will be a good indication of his political strategy. I'm leery of the advance publicity about such events; but this piece by Amanda Terkel - based on an anonymous source for no apparent good reason - reports the pre-speech White House spin: President Obama Previews State Of The Union Speech To State, Local Officials Huffington Post 01/20/2012.

He's pointing to his own speech at Osawatomie last December 6 as a model for the SOTU. That was the one that offered combative rhetoric that was inspiring to the Democratic base. But then at the end came the pepper-spraying: "These are not Democratic values or Republican values. These aren't 1% values, or 99% values. They're American values. And we have to reclaim them." As Charlie Pierce wrote at the time:

More important, in our current political context, these are very much "99 percent values." They are not one percent values. The One Percent could care less if there ever is a thriving middle class in this country again. They'd sell the entire American middle class to the Somali pirates if there was a buck in it. There may be a political calculation at work here — Embrace the energy of the Occupy movement, Mr. President, but stay the hell out of the damn drum circle! — but the fact remains that the effectiveness of the "We Are the 99 Percent" argument is completely dependent upon its independence from the anesthetic stupor brought on by ameliorative political rhetoric.

It's also been part of Obama's pattern to say nice things that sound good to his Democratic base, then go out and whack the base in some way a day or so later. And the White House is already setting up for this: Alexander Bolton, Obama warns left: You won't like budget The Hill 01/17/12.

Obama's political seems to be really wedded to the "punch the hippies" strategy. But they are never going to be able to out-Newt Newt on the culture war rhetoric - or even outdo Willard on it, for that matter. They would be much better advised to align themselves clearly with "99% values" and can the bipartisanship hokum.

Tags: 2012 election, barack obama, newt gingrich