Wishful thinking on Trump's mass deportation program

Some Republican big growers in California have apparently talked themselves into thinking the Trump mass deportation of undocumented workers won't affect them much.

In his report, Rory Carroll (Latino laborers fear deportation, but officials tell California farmers not to fret Guardian 02/20/2017) quotes two lines from the Lennon-McCartney song "Strawberry Fields Forever":

Living is easy with eyes closed
Misunderstanding all you see.

It's true that the State of California under Gov. Jerry Brown has made it clear that it won't willingly cooperate with a mass deportation program. And California growers have gone through various cycles in which xenophobia against Latino immigrants attracts more attention and support from politicians. But California agriculture depends on undocumented immigrant labor. So the growers in the past have always been able to count on wink-and-a-nod laxity in enforcement, even while they can hold the threat of deportation or illegal firings over their workers' heads.

Some of them apparently think things will go on as in past cycles of xenophobic hostility. Others are more apprehensive about not being able to hire enough workers, probably the more realistic perspective at the moment. But Carroll observes, "Both versions, for now, are accurate – a dissonance stemming from ambiguity over current government policies and the fact that no one has any clue what will happen next."

“It’s a lot of hype from the advocacy groups and the media,” said Rob Roy, head of the Ventura County Agricultural Association. “I deal with over 100 farms and not had one farmer come to me with any complaint about immigration issues or raids.”

Ice enacted similar raids under Barack Obama, who deported a record 2.5m people with little media outcry, Roy said. “But with Trump, suddenly the moral fibre of our country is coming apart. I don’t think Ice is going to start running into fields and taking away farm workers. I don’t believe that.”

This also struck me:

“It’s a lot of hype from the advocacy groups and the media,” said Rob Roy, head of the Ventura County Agricultural Association. “I deal with over 100 farms and not had one farmer come to me with any complaint about immigration issues or raids.”

Ice enacted similar raids under Barack Obama, who deported a record 2.5m people with little media outcry, Roy said. “But with Trump, suddenly the moral fibre of our country is coming apart. I don’t think Ice is going to start running into fields and taking away farm workers. I don’t believe that.”

That link is to an earlier Guardian article, also by Rory Carroll, that provides some useful reality-based discussion of the US immigration situation, How Breitbart and the conservative right opened a new front in the war over fake news 12/15/2016, where he writes:

Breitbart faults the Guardian for using the oft-cited statistic that the Obama administration deported a record 2.5 million people, saying this is misleading or inaccurate because authorities have “inflated” the number by including a category of border crossers which used to be counted as “returned” rather than formally deported.

It is true that authorities are now prosecuting and often jailing more border crossers before formally deporting them, whereas in previous eras most were swiftly returned to Mexico with little formality. If you include returnees as well as deportees, the Clinton and Bush administrations sent back far more people than the Obama administration.

But the fact remains that Obama has formally deported more than his predecessors. This table from the Department of Homeland Security’s annual yearbook of immigration statistics shows the record going back to 1892.

One reason formal deportations have risen is deterrence. The strategy is to punish illicit border crossing with months or even years in jail. Another reason is demographic shifts. The number of Mexicans trying to cross has plunged while the numbers from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador have surged. They latter cannot simply be dumped back across the Rio Grande.

The Obama Administration didn't undertake the kind of systematic mass deportation of current undocumented residents that Trump promised on the campaign trail and is clearly trying to implement in practice. That doesn't mean that Obama's deportation policy was a good one. But it is important to make distinctions, both to understand what's going on and to counter the stock propaganda justification of "well, Obama did it, too!"

The December 15 article includes this chart based on Homeland Security data:

But Obama's immigration policy was a prime example of the toxic brand of "bipartisanship" he practiced. He justified his aggressive detention and deportation program to Democrats by packaging it as an attempt to get comprehensive immigration reform by convincing Republicans he was serious about border enforcement. Not only did it not achieve the alleged goal of getting enough Republicans to support comprehensive immigration reform to get it passed. It also reinforced the Republican framing of the immigration issue as one of law-enforcement in which harsher is better than humane.

How could a Democrat frame the immigration issue differently? Like Jerry Brown did in his State of the State address this year:

A few moments ago, I swore into office our new attorney general. Like so many others, he is the son of immigrants who saw California as a place where, through grit and determination, they could realize their dreams. And they are not alone, millions of Californians have come here from Mexico and a hundred other countries, making our state what it is today: vibrant, even turbulent, and a beacon of hope to the rest of the world.

We don't have a Statue of Liberty with its inscription: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free..." But we do have the Golden Gate and a spirit of adventure and openness that has welcomed - since the Gold Rush of 1848 - one wave of immigration after another.

For myself, I feel privileged to stand before you as your governor, as did my father almost sixty years ago. His mother, Ida, the youngest of eight children, was born in very modest circumstances, not very far from where we are gathered today. Her father arrived in California in 1852, having left from the Port of Hamburg, aboard a ship named "Perseverance."

It is that spirit of perseverance and courage which built our state from the beginning. And it is that spirit which will get us through the great uncertainty and the difficulties ahead.

... in California, immigrants are an integral part of who we are and what we've become. They have helped create the wealth and dynamism of this state from the very beginning.

I recognize that under the Constitution, federal law is supreme and that Washington determines immigration policy. But as a state we can and have had a role to play. California has enacted several protective measures for the undocumented: the Trust Act, lawful driver's licenses, basic employment rights and non-discriminatory access to higher education.

We may be called upon to defend those laws and defend them we will. And let me be clear: we will defend everybody - every man, woman and child - who has come here for a better life and has contributed to the well-being of our state.

Trump's threatened deportations - and Obama's actual ones

For those of us who worried for the last eight years about President Obama's fondness for Bipartisanship, Donald Trump's election gives us repeated occasion for deep, weary sighs.

Like Trump's promise to deport millions of undocumented immigrants. One of the BBC Mundo articles uses "irregular" instead of "undocumented." The threat being bandied about right now is to deport three million with criminal records. Not surprisingly, that estimate seems to be anywhere from four to ten times the available estimates that are worth considering as serious for undocumented immigrants. There may be more legal immigrants with some kind of criminal background. Minor offenses on ones record are not a ban to American citizenship.

What progressives are pointing out, and what rightwingers will toss back at those of us who object to Trump's deportations is that in his two terms in office, the Obama Administration has apparently deported at least three million. Gerardo Lissardy reports that the Administration deported 2.5 million between 2009 and 2015.

• ¿De dónde sacó Donald Trump el número de hasta 3 millones de indocumentados que dice querer deportar de Estados Unidos? BBC Mundo 14.11.2016
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• Gerardo Lissardy , Estados Unidos: así se compara el anuncio de deportaciones de Trump con el récord de deportados de Obama BBC Mundo 14.11.2016

Of course, the people who are most concerned about Trump's anti-immigrant deportation threats were also complaining about Obama's level of deportations.

Still, that doesn't mean we can't make real distinctions between what happened during the Obama Administration and whatever it is Trump may do, when appropriate.

For instance, deporting three million people within one or two years would be a whole different operation in terms of scope, intensity and bad consequences.

Still, even though Obama has taken measures to protect some categories of undocumented immigrants, like the mothers of American citizen children, in his first years in office he pushed deportation and border-fence building, justifying it as a Bipartisan way to get the Republcians to agree to comprehensive immigration reform. Whether he actually thought that was feasible or it was just an excuse to tell Democrats, the results are the same: no comprehensive immigration reform and the Republican Party doing major demagoguery over it.

Obama's deportations, as Lissardy reports, are a Presidential record. He notes that some Latino leaders refer to Obama as the Deporter-in-Chief.

I wonder if that may have affected the enthusiasm among the Latino community for voting for Hillary Clinton, who was clearly campaigning to have Obama's Third Term.

Unfortunately, Obama's deportation record means that Jimmy Dore's prediction in this report may not be off the wall, although I'm not nearly as optimistic on that score as he is, PREDICTION: Trump Will Deport LESS Immigrants Than Obama The Young Turks 11/13/2016:

Trump's transition team and immigration policy

Pilar Marrero is covering the immigration and deportation policies of the Trump Administration-in-the-making. In Ideólogo de la “auto deportación” hace parte del equipo de Trump La Opinión, she reports on the large role Kris Kobach, one of the xenophobes' heroes, plays in the Trump transition team.

Currently Secretary of State in Kansas, he has distinguished himself by his p[romotion of segregationist voter-suppression methods. Trump also made a point of identifying himself closely with anti-Latino xenophobes like Alabama Republican Sen. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III and the infamous Sheriff Joe Arpaio, thankfully defeated this week for re-election.

Kobach affirmed publicly this week that Trump intends to proceed with his famous wall, the only question being how fast and who will pay for it.

Not only will US-Mexico relations be very different under a Trump Administration. There will be some direct spillover affect from Trump's Mexico and deportation policies to how governments and electorates in the rest of Latin America view the United States. Trump ran on a campaign of blatant hostility to Latinos, Latino immigrants and to Mexico and Mexico in particular.

She cites this news report on California's own Secretary of State Alex Padilla's reaction to Kobach's role in the Trump transition: John Myers, California's top elections official calls Trump's choice for immigration advisor 'troubling' and a threat to minorities Los Angeles Times 11/10/2016. Padilla said, "Mr. Trump’s selection of Kris Kobach to the immigration transition team sends a deeply troubling message that telegraphs an imminent assault on our collective voting rights and civil rights."

Digby looks at Kobach along with a couple of other deplorables on Trump's transition team in What will the Trump administration look like? Our first clues are uniformly awful Salon 11/11/2016:

And when it comes to that all-important issue of immigration policy, Trump announced on Thursday that he had named Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state and hard-core anti-immigration activist, to his transition team. Koback wrote State Bill 1070, the infamous Arizona “show me your papers” law, which was later overturned by the courts. He has been informally advising the campaign about immigration and was supposedly the one who convinced Trump how the government could find some way to make Mexico pay for the mythical border wall.

Partisan attitudes on Syrian refugees

I'm still processing the implications of the relationship between US anti-Islamic nationalism, Trump-like xenophobia and anti-Latino prejudice and hatred.

The Brookings Institute and the Anwar Sadat Chair for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland have published the results of a survey on American attitudes on refugees from the Middle East 06/13/2016. The survey was done at the end of May, so does not an effect of the Orlando massacre this past weekend:

If the United States screens refugees for security risks, 59% of Americans support taking in refugees from the conflicts in Syria and other Middle Eastern countries, while 41% oppose. Support is stronger among Democrats (77%) and Millennials (68%). Opposition is strongest among supporters of Donald Trump (77%) and Republicans (63%).

Although only 3 refugees have been arrested since 9/11 over terrorism charges, an overwhelming majority of Americans (84%) believe that there have been more than 5 arrests, with 28% believing that there have been 100 or more. Those who are 55 years of age or older are more likely than Millennials to think this (33% compared to 22%).

Across party lines, Republicans are more likely to estimate that a larger number of refugees have been arrested over terrorism links. [my emphasis]

Republicans are more likely to oppose responses that would bring more refugees to the U.S. The percentage of Republicans who oppose the U.S. government taking in more [war] refugees (75%) is more than double that of Democrats who feel this way (34%). The same is true when asked about individuals and community groups, such as churches, sponsoring more refugees and helping them with funds and assistance to settle in the U.S. 51% of Republicans oppose this whereas only 25% of Democrats do. Looking at responses abroad, Republicans and Democrats do not vary too much in their support. For example, 78% of Republicans and 83% of Democrats support the U.S. sending professionals in humanitarianism work to help refugees in camps abroad.

Twenty-one percent of Americans think that the U.S. should expel the Syrian refugees who are already in the country, while 76% say the U.S. should ‘welcome them and help absorb them into American society.’ Younger Americans are less likely to want Syrian refugees expelled (16%) compared to 24% of 35-54 year olds and 23% of Americans 55 and older. Republicans are also four times more likely than Democrats to want refugees expelled with 36% compared to 9% of responses. Democrats are more likely than Republicans and Independents to say that the U.S. should welcome refugees and help absorb them into American society, with 90% of Democrats feeling this way.

The report doesn't mention correlations with attitudes toward Latinos or undocumented Latino refugees.

More on the Social Security/Medicare wobble watch

This has been a real "what Digby says" week. Because she has been following Obama's push for a Grand Bargain since before he was first inaugurated. In It's Official Hullabaloo 04/05/2013, she writes:

Mark this day. For the first time in history, a Democratic president has officially proposed to cut the Democratic Party's signature New Deal program, Social Security ...

Meanwhile prepare for a barrage of savvy, world weary commentary from your fellow liberals telling you that this is no big thing and that Democrats will not suffer even a tiny bit if they vote for a common sense proposal like this one. You will be shushed and told to calm down and take a chill pill. In other words, you will be gaslighted by fellow liberals who are embarrassed that you aren't being coolly accepting of something that is completely unacceptable. This is how this works. Tell them to STFU and move out of the way.

In A couple of elite Villagers explain their formula for deciding what's "sensible." 04/06/2013, she quotes from the bipartisan consensus between SocSec/Medicare opponent and "liberal" E.J. Dionne and SocSec/Medicare opponent and conservative David "Bobo" Brooks. She calls attention to their mutual joy at hippie-punching (a phrase which I believe she popularized in Left Blogostan). Here's establishment liberal Dionne: "I'm very glad a lot of Democrats came out against the president's proposal to change the index for Social Security because, if nothing else, this shows that President Obama has really been willing to put some hard stuff on the table."

And our old friend Bobo: "I, too, am glad Democrats came out against because it suggests there's something sensible in what Obama has proposed."

Digby observes:

It's good to know that one thing hasn't changed, even in this era of right wing cranks and Tea Party intransigence: Villagers automatically approve of anything the liberal faction of the Democratic Party is against. I'm a little bit surprised that it still has such salience but I shouldn't be. These people are very uncomfortable with the idea that the salt-o-the-earth Real Americans might be the true radicals while the tired old hippies and their nerdy political heirs are just trying to hold on to a country that doesn't starve old and sick people.

It's a very lazy and convenient way to order the world, but I'm afraid that when it comes to Social Security and medicare [sic] it might not be the best guide to how the people feel about it.

Part of this is a reflection of the extent to which the "culture wars" as they played out in 1968-72 still influence the frameworks used by today's Beltway Villagers. They're still assuming that the Democrats to be successful have to run away from George McGovern. But "liberals" like E.J. Dionne who oppose Social Security and Medicare can go [Cheney] themselves. McGovern himself addressed this issue last year, a few months before his death (George McGovern's Comments on Social Security and Medicare - January 2012):

Digby again:

Oh, and unlike a lot of important issues, these are issues voters understand very well and they vote on them. It's not abstract and theoretical. It will affect every American.

Not that it matters in the Village. To them the world stopped sometime around 1975 and "sensible" policies are defined by opposition to the crazy hippie fringe[.] I guess it makes them feel young again[.]

Here is what SocSec/Medicare opponent Barack Obama had to see in his weekly Saturday address today. He sidestepped any mentioned of cuts in benefits to Social Security, but he does promote the Medicare cuts:

I’ve already signed more than $2.5 trillion in deficit reduction into law, and my budget will reduce our deficits by nearly $2 trillion more, without harming the recovery. That surpasses the goal of $4 trillion in deficit reduction that many economists believe will stabilize our finances.

We’ll make the tough reforms required to strengthen Medicare for the future, without undermining the rock-solid guarantee at its core. And we’ll enact commonsense tax reform that includes closing wasteful tax loopholes for the wealthy and well-connected – loopholes like the ones that can allow a billionaire to pay a lower tax rate than his or her secretary.

This is the compromise I offered the Speaker of the House at the end of last year.

The framework he's building here is, not surprisingly, the same as that of the Republican Party, the Peterson Foundation and its various front groups, and other opponents of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, which is to cast programs that benefit the elderly or the poor as detracting from programs that benefit the young and productive.

This guy was more supportive of Social Security in 2008:

Bobo was also doing his weekly schtick with Sleepy Mark Shields on the PBS Newshour yesterday, Shields and Brooks on the Job Numbers, Obama's Budget Bargaining Prospects 04/05/2013:

Bobo at around 6:00 talks his pet Hernert Hoover nonsense about how unemployment is all structural and the federal gubment can't really do anything about it starting at around 6:00, and does the generational-accounting pitch, also known as the "greedy geezers" line. And he uses the you-do-this construction like a mechanic explaining to someone how to repair a flat tire:

You increase training. You increase infrastructure spending. You get the education system, and mostly you devote less resources, fewer resources to the elderly and consumption on health care for the affluent, and much more to young families and young workers, and shift what's turned into a -- really a redistribution machine at the age scale. [my emphasis]

This was their bridge to talking about Obama's proposed cuts in benefits to Social Security and Medicare. Here's how the liberal lion Sleepy Mark approaches it:

I mean, this is a real body blow to those who have accused President Obama of being a socialist.

This is hardly a socialistic approach.

In addition, I mean, for not taking difficult political stands, he's been bombarded by the liberal part of his own party and many liberal groups. You know, I think, Judy, that he's probably the last best chance we're going have to reach any kind of a big or semi-big agreement is in what the president is going to unveil in his budget next Wednesday.

And I think it's an absolutely legitimate point on his side to say that the Republicans have to come up with revenue if we are going to do this, because this is a blow to the Democrats. It's been the Holy Grail of the Democratic Party platform for the past 70 years, Social Security.

And, you know, I think, in that sense, we will find out whether the commonsense caucus that editorial writers and some of the leading pundits have spoken about, whether it's the Loch Ness Monster of American politics or whether it's a reality. [my emphasis]

If someone had nudged him fully aware, his response might have been a bit more coherent. But last week he sounded like he was on a double-dose of caffeine and was ranting about how the Roe v. Wade decision had been a big mistake and Real Americans oppose gun control, so being back to his normal state of semi-stupor was an improvement, I guess.

But he's clearly hopeful that the cuts to Social Security and Medicare go through, because that's the consensus of "the commonsense caucus that editorial writers and some of the leading pundits have spoken about," i.e., the conventional wisdom among the Villagers. So Sleep Mark's on board.

And so is Bobo:

Well, I think he's taking the right approach.

I mean, we have the Patty Murray, the Senate Democratic budget over here. We have got the Ryan budget over there. He's sort of a little closer to Murray, obviously, but he's sort of in the ballpark of where a deal will be cut.

And so some of the things I think are right and good policies, this chained CPI, which will be adjusting Social Security revenues or benefits. Some of the things, I think, are a little less persuasive. He's got some Medicare things which are not structural reform, but just trying to tamp down reimbursements at the same time as we are just running away from any kind of effort to control Medicare costs.

But if he can take this chained CPI, this Social Security thing, and he can put in a few little more moderate Medicare reforms, structural reforms, like combining Medicare A and B and some other things that I think that has some bipartisan agreement, then I do believe there are a number of Republicans who would be willing to give on revenues.

And then you -- we're not going to have a grand bargain, but then do you see a bargain. You see a functioning government making progress.

As Digby characterized his performance on NPR, Bobo "needs a little bit more in cuts for the elderly and the sick to truly make him happy. And Lord knows, the White House yearns to make David Brooks happy."

This will be a real dividing point in American politics, maybe as much so or more than the Iraq War has been.

Oh, yeah. The idea of cutting benefits on Social Security and Medicare ain't popular: As Sequester Deadline Looms, Little Support for Cutting Most Programs Pew Research Center 02/22/2013. All of 10% of the public supports cutting Social Security benefits, with 6% supporting cutting veterans benefits. "Chained CPI" that the White House says Obama will formally propose in his budget cuts both. Support for cutting Medicare is all the way up at 15%. The disconnect between the public and and the political/media elite on these issues is amazing.

Will the Bobos and the Dionnes and the Mark Shieldses who are so spectacularly wrong about this be discredited as Very Serious People when it turns out to be a screamingly unpopular idea and derails what's left of Obama's second-term agenda? Were those who were wrong about the Iraq War so discredited? Who knows, miracles can happen. But in any case, we should give all opponents of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid the chance to sympathize with each other that they were neglected prophets on this issue by defeating Obama's proposals to cut benefits on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

Tags: austerity economics, barack obama, comprehensive immigration reform, grand bargain, gun regulation, medicaid, medicare, republican party, social security

Social Security/Medicare wobble watch

Now that the Democratic President is endorsing cuts in benefits to Social Security and Medicare in his budget to be formally proposed next week, we're going to see various Democratic partisans, Obama admirers and left-leaning journalists who prefer to stay on the good side of White House finding ways to go wobbly on defending Social Security.

Josh Marshall's Obama’s Dangerous Game TPM 04/05/2013 shows some hints of this. He articulates what he sees as the White House position:

In conversations with the president’s key advisors and the President himself over the last three years one point that has always come out to me very clearly is that the President really believes in the importance of the Grand Bargain. He thinks it's an important goal purely on its own terms. That's something I don't think a lot of his diehard supporters fully grasp. He thinks it's important in longrange fiscal terms (and there's some reality to that). But he always believes it's important for the country and even for the Democratic party to have a big global agreement that settles the big fiscal policy for a generation and let's the country get on to other issues — social and cultural issues, the environment, building the economy etc.

Watch for those phrases like "(and there's some reality to that)."

No, actually, long-term fiscal healthy does not require cuts in benefits for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and veterans benefits. The long-term problems of growth in health care costs also adversely impact Medicare. But Medicare actually acts as a restraint on health care costs. And some more recent data on health care cost increases project lower growth than what has been assumed in previous years.

There's a good, very practical case for expanding both Medicare and Social Security.

But the conventional assumption is that "entitlements", the propaganda term for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid preferred by their opponents to make them sound like "welfare", are some dire threat to the country's economic well-being. As conditions change, the justifications for cutting benefits and putting those programs on the road to abolition also shift. But they are based in Herbert Hoover economics. And more specifically in the greed of Wall Street financiers who would love to have retirement and health care fully privatized so they could take huge cuts in fees from the funds that now go to retirees and to health care costs.

At this point, I'm ready to shift by assumption about Obama's understanding of the whole framework of social insurance. I've assumed up until now that his concept of the Grand Bargain was something like Josh describes, "to have a big global agreement that settles the big fiscal policy for a generation and let's the country get on to other issues — social and cultural issues, the environment, building the economy etc." Although I would add that he seems to think this postpartisan heaven would reduce those other issues to more technical issues that reasonable elites could handle in an agreeable fashion without a lot of noisy and annoying interference by voters and ordinary workers who are the most directly affected by them. The "end of ideology," as the dream was called in an earlier incarnation, or "the end of history" in another.

But I imagined that he thought that cutbacks in benefits to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid would be a one-time thing that would then lead to full acceptance by the Republicans of those programs.

Now I'm starting to think he buys into a more radical privatization framework. His healthy care program, which the Republicans are shrieking is a totalitarian imposition, is famously similar to that on which Bob Dole campaigned when running for President as the Republican nominee in 1994. Obama may well see 401(k)'s and the remnants of the private pension system as an adequate and preferable substitute for Social Security. And Obamacare, with its absence of a public option, as a desirable substitute for Medicare and Medicaid.

That implies even more cynicism on Obama's part than even most of his sharpest Democratic partisan critics have assumed so far. But since his course opens those programs up to even more aggressive political attacks the moment his Grand Bargain deals gets enacted, that's a straightforward possibility. Assuming he hopes for a postpartisan state of "end of ideology" harmony at least allows him a dream of a more harmonious state. But it's delusional. Take your pick.

Rick Perlstein at his Facebook page today quotes from that paragraph of Josh Marshall and gives his own translation:

Yes. Me: "There’s something so arbitrary about it, so cliché: pick the one thing that Republicans are supposed to cherish most (tax cuts!). Pick the one thing Democrats are supposed to cherish most (spending!). If you get both to give up what they cherish, something transcendent has occurred; something mystical; something deep, deep inside America's soul—healing! It’s almost as if, were the Democrats' most cherished nostrum was that the sky is blue; and if the Republicans’ most cherished nostrum were that the sky is red, Obama somehow imagines that if he can somehow get both to agree that the sky is purple, lo and behold, America will finally be a warm and conciliatory place."

Josh claims to be giving context to the proposed cuts:

First, though I think these cuts are a bad idea, they’re are qualitatively different from efforts to dismantled and phase out Social Security through privatization and private accounts.

Yes, I suppose you could say that serious and damaging cuts that make many people's lives visibly harder are qualitatively different that immediately abolishing the programs altogether.

There are also a number of progressive economists and policy analysts that think this might be a positive step in the context of other changes to get the country’s longterm financial house in order.

He doesn't name any. And since supporting cuts in benefits to Social Security and Medicare make someone by definition something other than "progressive" the way I look at it, I have no idea who or what he means here.

But that last point is key: it doesn't make sense if you just do it alone, if Social Security doesn't get anything back as part of the same bargain. Otherwise, when you do finally come to a deal that brings major new revenue in (and it will come) Social Security and other similar programs will be asked to take yet more hits.

Even the sentences don't make sense there. If we raise or eliminate the cap on Social Security taxes, that takes care of any financing problems with Social Security for upteen years and probably until hell freezes over. But he seems to be saying that it only makes sense to cut Social Security benefits unless Social Security also gets more revenue which means benefits have to be cut even more if it does. Which really doesn't make jack for sense to me.

Second, on the politics, President Obama and his advisors have made clear this isn’t what President Obama is actually for. He doesn’t think it’s a good idea.

This is generous way beyond what the facts indicate. Obama has been talking about the Grand Bargain to cut benefits on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid since before his first inauguration. Digby at Hullabaloo has been faithfully tracking it ever since then. Maybe Josh should check out her blog occasionally.

So really this is just the President negotiating with himself, validating the wisdom of big Social Security cuts while Republicans are still saying — and show no signs of not saying — that no more taxes should ever go up ever.

Now, the counter to this is that the optics of going the extra length helps the President with swing voters who want to see he’s trying to compromise. I’m uncertain about that. But that’s certainly part of the calculus.

The whole argument is silly. Polls consistently show that cuts in benefits to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are very unpopular: with Democrats, with swing voters, with Republicans. Even if Josh's sources at the White House are claiming that, they have surely seen the polls. Josh is being very credulous to credit them with thinking that. Obama is trying to make a deal by doing something he knows is very unpopular because it very damaging.

Robert Reich explains why the "chained CPI" proposal is such a scam and why the benefit cuts involved in using it the way the Democratic President is now proposing is a really bad idea, Robert Reich on Chained CPI (the proposal to cut Social Security benefits) 04/03/2013:

Tags: austerity economics, barack obama, comprehensive immigration reform, grand bargain, gun regulation, medicaid, medicare, republican party, social security

Radical Republicans and fumbling corporate Democrats

Krugman, after analyzing columnist Jonathan Chait for going brain-dead over Matt Yglesias' recent real estate purchase, writes, "The lesson here is never to take right-wing huffiness about the process of politics and political debate seriously. These guys don't actually believe in any rules at all; whatever rule they may lay down in one case, they’ll break in an instant if they think they see an advantage." (Attacking Success 03/23/2013)

"Never," of course is a big word. And, not so long ago, I would have probably qualified a statement like that by saying it applied to hardline, dogmatic rightwingers including a lot of prominent Republican figures like Newt Gingrich. But I would have added that it wasn't so much the case with moderate Republicans like [fill in your favorite example from bygone times].

But now, when "moderate Republican" has become as self-contradictory a term as "lightweight heaviness," I can't really say that any more.

And when I think about it a bit, "not so long ago" in this case basically means 10 years ago, the beginning of the Iraq War. The Republicans were so cynical and so self-righteous in the face they put on their cynicism, and so openly contemptuous of those who disagreed that I lost any real sense from the Republican side of goodwill or serious consideration of the common good in their positions. It was quite a contrast to what Linda Feldmann in 2006 referred to as "the serious, dignified tone of deliberation that preceded the Gulf war, in 1991." (The Iraq war debate reopens in Washington Christian Science Monitor 06/13/2006)

But you have only to look at the full sentence in which that phrase appears to see how much things have changed: "House majority leader John Boehner (R) of Ohio, who has long planned for this week's debate, hopes to match the serious, dignified tone of deliberation that preceded the Gulf war, in 1991." And if you think that there might have been some tiny amount of seriousness in Boehner's expressed intent, you have only to read the immediately following sentence, "Most of his GOP colleagues support the idea."

And it's gotten steadily worse since 2003. As Charlie Pierce chronicles weekly at the Esquire Politics Blog, not only are the Republicans in Congress as happily hardline as ever. But the Republicans in statehouses and state legislatures even after the resounding Democratic win nationwide in 2012 are going full speed ahead on trying to wreck unions, dismantle public education and establish new controls over what women do with their ladyparts.

And in Congress, they are conducting themselves more like a revolutionary party intent on discrediting the entire existing form of government than on anything resembling pragmatic solutions for major national problems. Our Pod Pundits, reciting their Washington Beltway Village lines, chatter about some struggle between moderate and conservative Republicans. But that debate is occurring in their Village imaginations. Yes, there is a Tea Party faction that raves about the insufficient conservatism of the "Republican establishment." But it usually means something like that the "establishment" candidate hates immigrants, but isn't vocal and nasty enough about his hatred. Or that the "establishment" candidate thinks you should only say "some girls rape easy" (Wisconsin State representative Roger Rivard) when there are no microphones around, while the Tea Party zealot thinks it should be obvious that if a woman gets raped, "the bitch was asking for it." OK, I haven't heard any prominent Tea Partier say the latter outright, but it's the obvious meaning of Rivard's comment, Richard Mourdoch's comment that pregnancy resulting from rape "it is something that God intended to happen" and Todd Akin's "legitimate rape" nonsense; see Erin Gloria Ryan, Team Rape Lost Big Last Night Jezebel 11/07/2012. Though all Republicans would take a different attitude if the rapist were black and the victim white.

As Henry Decker reports in 'GOP Autopsy’ Is Dead On Arrival National Memo 03/18/2013, the Republican Party sees no strong motive to change anything but its marketing. "With the exception of a qualified push for immigration reform, the [Republicans National Committee's] Growth and Opportunity Project centers around the idea that the Republican Party’s platform is sound, while the messaging is at fault. That comes as no surprise — it was RNC chairman Reince Priebus, after all, who recently declared "I don’t think our platform is the issue."

But Robert Reich comments on a major reason, maybe the major reason, why the Republican Party feels no obvious pressure to de-crazyfy itself in Selling the Store: Why Democrats Shouldn't Put Social Security and Medicare on the Table 03/21/2013:

Prominent Democrats — including the President and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi — are openly suggesting that Medicare be means-tested and Social Security payments be reduced by applying a lower adjustment for inflation.

This is even before they've started budget negotiations with Republicans ...

It’s not the first time Democrats have led with a compromise, but these particular pre-concessions are especially unwise. ...

Social Security and Medicare are the most popular programs ever devised by the federal government, which is why Republicans hate them so much. If average Americans have trusted the Democratic Party to do one thing it has been to guard these programs from the depredations of the GOP.

Reich doesn't seem to have recognized, or maybe he doesn't quite believe them yet, the more recent projections that show a slowing in projected health care inflation. But he's dead right in pointing to the absurdity of the position Obama-Brüning and Pelosi are taking. For the Democrats, becoming the lead advocates for cuts in benefits to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid is just lemming instinct. Although as I've said here before, that's unfair to lemmings, because they plunge over the cliff and drown because they are so determined to get to where they're headed. With the Dems it's become more, "Hey, let's drown ourselves so we'll look moderate!" But they might as well adopt this as the official Party anthem:

And Reich adds this killer question: "Paul Ryan's House Republican budget takes on Medicare, but leaves Social Security alone. Why should Democrats lead the charge on either?"

The good news is that Obama-Brüning and Pelosi are still having to advocate for the cuts because they haven't happened yet. For some reason, this comes to mind when I start thinking about how the Dems got here:

Tags: austerity economics, barack obama, comprehensive immigration reform, grand bargain, gun regulation, medicaid, medicare, republican party, social security

The Grand Bargain to cut benefits on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid is just as bad an idea now as in 2009

Digby has been closely following President Obama-Brüning's effort to strike a Grand Bargain to cut benefits on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid (aka, "entitlements") since before his first inauguration in 2009. She's been the best analyst I know of on the whole rotten idea.

In How to succeed as an opposition party without really trying Hullabaloo 03/08/2013, she reminds us again what a bad concept in was for everyone except Republican greedheads like Peter Peterson who have been looking to get their hands on the Social Security cash flow and rake huge investment banking profits off of it:

The original calculation of the Grand Bargain was always daft: deficit reduction in a time of massive unemployment and a moribund economy. And even worse that the Bargain was defined as some sort of amorphous "revenue" from people who won't even feel it in exchange for benefits cuts to some of the neediest people in the country. This is also known as a "balanced approach" (to a problem that doesn't doesn't need fixing.) That we've taken a hatchet to discretionary programs is just frosting on the cake. Well played.

The bottom line is this: I think it would be nice to raise some more "revenue." But it is definitely not worth this price and I doubt very seriously it will last any longer than the Clinton tax hikes lasted --- that is until the Republicans regain the presidency. They are not going to overnight become friendly to the idea of progressive taxation, so whatever tiny little accommodation we get now is it, and it's very temporary. But the people of this country will be suffering for many, many years from the cuts to vital programs that were given up in this Bargain.

In an earlier post, The Village: "very, very privileged people wanting to make sure they cut spending on everybody else?" 03/07/2013, she writes:

... we've had a bipartisan National Security policy for decades, one that has always placed a premium on our continued global military hegemony. There is nothing particularly new about that, as appalling as it is. But a Democratic president leading the way to cutting Social Security and Medicare is something new. There was a time when that would have been unthinkable. I've said it before, but it's more and more obvious to me that if the Democratic Party sells out its constituents on "entitlements" --- which they fought for and defended for over half a century, particularly at a time when their authentic democratic political power is stronger than it's been in over three decades, I'm hard pressed to see what the rationale for their continued existence really is. [my emphasis in bold]

She refers to an article on Social Security by Tom Edsall, who she describes as a "highly respected political reporter Tom Edsall, The War On Entitlements New York Times 03/06/2013.

Whenever referring to Edsall, I feel obligated to include the qualifier that, although he does some solid reporting and has for years, his analysis has an aggravating liberal-concern-troll aspect that has irritated me since I read his Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics (1991). He often analyses in terms that broadly agree with conservative talking points of the moment, thought phrased in a way to imply that he's a liberal who views his results sorrowfully. After having seen his arguments so often tending that way, I'm tempted to read that even into his conclusion in this piece:

Elite anxiety over entitlement-driven budget deficits and accumulating national debt has created a powerful class in the nation’s capital. The agenda of this class is in many respects on a collision course with mounting demands for action by those lower down the ladder to address the threat to government social insurance programs. Intransigent opposition by the better off and their representatives to raising the necessary revenue means that not only Social Security and Medicare face a budgetary ax.

Among the additional likely casualties: WIC, which provides free nutrition for women, infants and children; long-term and emergency unemployment compensation benefits; low-income housing vouchers; vaccines for poor children; schooling for children with disabilities; special education; preschool programs; child care for disadvantaged and vulnerable children; after-school programs; treatment of the mentally ill; and meals for sick and homebound seniors.

This conflict could not have come at a more difficult time: the United States is in the midst of a zero sum struggle requiring politicians to pick losers, not winners. The population of those over 65 is set to multiply, with longevity steadily increasing even as median annual household income for the population at large has shrunk to $51,584 in January 2013 from $54,000 in 2008.

In this kind of conflict over limited goods, one of the most valuable resources that can get lost in the fray is the wisdom of the electorate at large. In this case, the electorate is pointing toward progressive tax increases for those closer to the top far more readily than members of the political class, for whom high-earners are a crucial source of campaign contributions.

But however Edsall himself regards the value of that outcome, he is correct in describing the strong pressures to cut benefits on Social Security and Medicare and other programs that benefit others than only the super-rich. Pressures actively encouraged right now by Medicare opponent Barack Obama.

Digby's comment on the effect of the Democrats supporting cuts in benefits to benefits on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, "I'm hard pressed to see what the rationale for their continued existence really is", really resonates with me. Although it's like what I think of a classic Jesuit comment that first makes me think, "Something's not quite right about that." But then I find myself not being able to think about the issue without taking account of that comment.

I have a hard time envisioning what that might mean in practice for the Democrats to lose "the rationale for their continued existence." There's always the standard third-party slogans to apply: there's not a dime's worth of difference between the two parties, if you vote for the lesser of two evils you'll get what you vote for, etc.

But even in a world in which politicians wouldn't even bother to pretend they were anything but corporate whores - how hard many of them are already to that point might be a matter of some discussion - there would still be competition between individuals to be first in line to collect their fees. And as long as elections are happening, there is always some room for people advocating positions not 100% consistent with a state of corporate whoredom to get a hearing, and even occasionally get elected. Even in the one-party segregated South, there were intense contests, including contests around issues, among candidates in the Democratic Party primaries as they competed for a majority of the white vote, nonwhites not normally having a vote to cast.

But I do think a Democratic Party that joins the Republicans, as Medicare opponent Obama-Brüning wants to do, in opposing the most basic social "safety net" programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, will put us into a fundamentally different political era for the Democratic Party.

I'm confident in saying it will not look like the postpartisan, end-of-ideology state on which Obama-Brüning seems to be so fixed. That happy state in which all "ideological" issues are settled: the requirement that rich people pay taxes to support their country, women grousing about how they should be able to control their own ladyparts, minorities complaining about being discriminated against, aspiring mall shooters griping that libruls are trying to limit their access to guns, workers thinking they have a right to join unions, old people expecting some kind of retirement in minimal dignity and with access to health care, all those will be resolved. All that will be left to discuss in politics will be technocratic issues, like which wars we should start this year, how much public land should be handed over to the extractive industries and at how low a price, and which new job-exporting, antilabor international trade agreements should be approved. The annoying public would happily accede to the advice of their betters in the corporate boardrooms, Wall Street casinos, K Street lobbying firms, the Pentagon and the pundits on TV talk-fests. And they will do their civic duty to show up every couple of years to select which corporate whore they think has greater celebrity appeal.

Shakira doesn't necessarily come first to mind when you think "protest song." But her song "Timor" comes to mind in this context:

It's alright, it's alright
The system never fails
The good guys are in power
And the bad guys are in jail

It's alright, it's alright
Just as long as we can vote
We'll have a democracy
And that's what we promote

Isn't it? Isn't it?

That is on her Oral Fixation Vol. 2 album from 2005, when George W. Bush was using "democracy promotion" as a prominent justification for perpetual war.

Tags: austerity economics, barack obama, comprehensive immigration reform, grand bargain, gun regulation, medicaid, medicare, shakira, social security

President Obama-Brüning is in full-tilt push again to cut benefits on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid

The PBS Newshour has the full video of Social Security opponent Barack Obama's press conference of 03/01/2013, President Obama Calls Spending Cuts "Dumb, Arbitrary", in which he was in Heinrich Brüning mode:

That news conference today is a great example of the disparity between the parties right now. The Republicans are proud of causing havoc because that's what their base wants. Our Democratic President, though, brags about fighting for destructive things that his own Party's voters oppose. So do big majorities of the public when it comes to cutting benefits on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, which seems to be Obama's only real goal in this sequester fight. From the WH transcript: "And what I've said very specifically, very detailed is that I'm prepared to take on the problem where it exists -- on entitlements -- and do some things that my own party really doesn't like. ... I am prepared to do hard things and to push my Democratic friends to do hard things."

In the video, you can see that he has to catch himself not to say FOX-style "my Democrat friends" there.

Also: "There are members of my party who violently disagree with the notion that we should do anything on Medicare. And I'm willing to say to them, I disagree with you, because I want to preserve Medicare for the long haul." As I mentioned in a post yesterday, the latter isn't true. Cutting benefits on Medicare is something every Democrat including the Democratic President should be fighting against. But Medicare supporters are stressing that the problem of health-care costs in Medicare is part of the larger growth of health-care costs. There have also been some recent indications that the longer-term trend of rising health-care expense is not so drastic as virtually everyone has been assuming for years.

In any case, Medicare does a better job of controlling health care costs than private insurance or the Great God Free Market does, because of Medicare's lower administrative costs, its bargaining power with suppliers, its evaluations of the effectiveness of treatments, and its coverage of preventive care.

Tags: austerity economics, barack obama, comprehensive immigration reform, grand bargain, gun regulation, medicaid, medicare, social security

President Obama-Brüning squanders his new mandate

President Obama-Brüning is working hard to drown the new mandate he won four months ago in the swamp of austerity economics.

Steve Kornacki breaks down the sad story for us in It's almost like the Tea Party won Salon 03/06/2013: "It's all a long way of saying we’re probably stuck with the sequester for the rest of this fiscal year – and maybe well beyond that. It's an outcome almost no one saw coming a year ago, and one made all the more remarkable by the fact that the most recent election seemed to represent a rebuke of the GOP and its embrace of Tea Party fiscal values."

One Percenter austerity economics (for everyone else!) can dominate in the current situation even when the voters decisively repudiate it, as we did in November 2012, because of the extyreme disparity of the two parties. The Republicans are willing to disrupt the government and tank the national economy in order to discredit Obama and the Democrats. The Democrats, on the other hand, weren't even willing to do something so obvious to limit the minority party's power to obstruct as abolishing the filibuster in the Senate. Nor, when they were in the minority during the Cheney-Bush Administration, were they willing to use the filibuster power against the Republicans on anything remotely approaching the scale the Republicans have used it against them.

Just plain corruption, of both the legal and illegal varieties, certainly play a big role in this. Campaign cash and post-Congressional rewards are more likely to come to Democrats who deliver corporate-friendly and labor-hostile results than to ones who support their consituents.

The current sequester cuts are significant. As the Dow Jones Industrial average hit its highest level ever, cuts affecting ordinary workers are kicking in. Robert Reich advises in Why There’s a Bull Market for Stocks And Bear Market for Workers 03/05/2013:

Some $1.9 billion in low-income rental subsidies are being eliminated, affecting 125,000 people. Cuts to the Department of Agriculture will eliminate rental assistance for another 10,000 low-income rural people. Meanwhile, 100,000 formerly homeless Americans are likely to be removed from their current emergency shelters.

More than 3.8 million Americans receiving long-term unemployment benefits will have their monthly payments reduced by as much as 9.4 percent, and lose an average of $400 in benefits over their period of joblessness.

The Department of Education’s Title I program, which helps schools serving more than a million disadvantaged students, will be cut $715 million, and $400 million will be cut from Head Start, the preschool program for poor children. And major cuts will be made in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, which provides nutrition assistance and education.

Eliot Spitzer talks about the current situation in The downside of the Dow's uptick for average Americans Current TV 04/06/2013:

But Obama-Brüning is particularly crass in his contempt for the very voters who elected and re-elected him. In his March 1 press conference on the sequester, he was bragging about how he supports cuts in benefits on "entitlements" (Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid) that not only Democratic voters but the general public oppose by large margins:

The problem that we have is a long-term problem in terms of our health care costs and programs like Medicare. And what I've said very specifically, very detailed is that I'm prepared to take on the problem where it exists -- on entitlements -- and do some things that my own party really doesn't like -- if it's part of a broader package of sensible deficit reduction. So the deal that I've put forward over the last two years, the deal that I put forward as recently as December is still on the table. I am prepared to do hard things and to push my Democratic friends to do hard things. [my emphasis]

Those deal offers to which he refers have included cuts in Social Security benefits using the "Chained CPI" gimmick and raising the Medicare eligibility age by two years to 67, a huge and very consequential cut to Medicare.

He returned to the theme:

... it's not as if Democrats aren't being asked to do anything, either, to compromise. There are members of my party who violently disagree with the notion that we should do anything on Medicare. And I'm willing to say to them, I disagree with you, because I want to preserve Medicare for the long haul. And we're going to have some tough politics within my party to get this done.

This is not a situation where I'm only asking for concessions from Republicans and asking nothing from Democrats.

His claim "There are members of my party who violently disagree with the notion that we should do anything on Medicare" of course isn't true. Do you know any Democratic elected official saying we should do nothing to control health care cost? Me neither.

Are we really at the point where we have to hope that Republican crazies hold fast against a Democratic President pushing to cut benefits on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid? Part of me still find that hard to process.

Kornacki notes that, despite pre-sequester indications that voters might blame Republicans more than Democrats and Obama-Brüning, "so far, public opinion has actually trended in the GOP's favor. Before sequestration went into effect last Friday, polling indicated that voters would be much more likely to blame Republicans than Obama. But a new CBS survey this week finds the public assigning blame almost evenly."

Reuters in Obama Approval Rating: President's Numbers Drop 7 Points, Poll Shows Huffington Post 03/06/2013 reports:

A Reuters/Ipsos online poll released on Wednesday showed 43 percent of people approve of Obama's handling of his job, down 7 percentage points from Feb. 19.

Most of that steep drop came in the week to Feb. 26 when it was becoming clear that Washington was going to be unable to put aside partisan differences and agree to halt automatic budget cuts which started last Friday.

Confounding the White House's efforts to blame Republicans for the cuts, most respondents in the online survey hold both Democrats and Republicans responsible.

Public opinion can be fickle, so we'll see how this develops.

But it doesn't surprise me. Obama's approval ratings cratered during the debt ceiling negotiations of 2011. And Obama does share a good portion of the blame, starting with not recognizing that the Republican Party is such a wrecker party they so far won't even accept his proposed benefit cuts on Social Security and Medicare. Plus, he looks to be back in his 2011 mode of begging the Reps to accept concessions, having them jack him around some more, then begging them again to accept even more concessions, over and over. And the sequester arrangement was something he willingly agreed to. (See Dean Baker, The Sequester Is President Obama's Fault Huffington Post 03/04/2013) Plus he continues to frame the economic issue in the Reps' preferred terms of The Deficit, The Deficit, The Deficit, and *brags* about wanting to cut benefits on very popular programs like Social Security and Medicare.

Obama-Brüning is squandering his mandate.

But in 2017, he can go on the road with Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson earning huge speaking fees from CEOs and investment bankers who enjoy being entertained with advice about how we have to toss more starving grannies into the street. And the rest of us can enjoy the 1st term of President Jeb Bush. Because we can never get enough of that good Bush family governance.

Or, given the current President's Heinrich Brüning act, maybe I should say that in 2017 we'll be dealing with President Jeb von Papen, after successor.

Tags: austerity economics, barack obama, comprehensive immigration reform, grand bargain, gun regulation, medicaid, medicare, social security

President Obama-Brüning strikes again

President Obama hasn't given up his Heinrich Brüning ambitions to see Grandma have to eat catfood. Because his respectable banker friends tell him its the sensible, bipartisan thing to do.

David Lawder and Richard Cowan report for Reuters in Budget crisis eases as Republicans seek to avoid shutdown 03/04/2013:

In telephone calls over the weekend, Obama raised the issue of cutting entitlement programs, which include Medicare, the healthcare program for the elderly and disabled, and Social Security retirement benefits.

"I will continue to seek out partners on the other side of the aisle so that we can create the kind of balanced approach of spending cuts, revenues, entitlement reform that everybody knows is the right way to do things," he said at the start of a Cabinet meeting on Monday.

From Tom Tomorrow 02/25/2013

After the previous cover that looked like something from the White Citizen's Council, Bloomberg Businessweek for 03/04-10/2013 features the two favorite rockstars of the let-Grandma-eat-catfood movement, Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles:

The online version of the article by Joshua Green is Why Won't Americans Listen to Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles? 02/28/2013, which is an odd title considering that President Obama and the entire Beltway Village treat them as wise fiscal gurus and they are the classic Very Serious People of the moment. But its a real puff piece - though it does have some interesting information, if only by accident - and the two old white guys pimping for greedy bankers like to pose as embattled truth-tellers. So Green and Businessweek obliged:

The purpose of this bromance — at least in its public-theater aspect—is to sound the alarm. “We’ve been on the road, probably visited 500,000 people since we turned in the report,” Simpson says when we meet at the Four Seasons Hotel before The Daily Show. "We tell ’em, 'Pull up a chair, we don't do bulls-‍ -‍ - or mush. [Gosh, Alan, we love it when you talk dirty!] We’ll tell you where your country is heading. We do math, not myths. So listen up.'" Audiences get an earful about Washington profligacy, the political system’s cowardice, and the need to take an ax to a whole array of supposedly sacrosanct programs. But mostly they’re told that without a long-overdue budget reckoning America is headed for disaster.

As Krugman notes repeatedly of them and others, the fact that they've been consistently wrong in their predictions doesn't prevent them from being treated like Kardashians on the cover of Businessweek.

Green does catch the sense of the deficit fetishists, who really mostly don't care about the deficit, with the possible exceptions of Obama-Brüning himself and David "Bobo" Brooks:

The enduring fantasy of deficit hawks like Simpson is that when the big players finally get serious, they’ll huddle in some backroom, roll up their sleeves, and hash out the deal that all right-thinking people know must be made, just as they did in 1983 with Social Security. They’ll be principled, spread the pain evenly. They won’t spare the rich or the old ladies. They’ll put the books in order. “We effectively hit everybody in America,” Simpson says. “That’s what makes our plan so tough.”

Yeah, they won't spare the rich [gasp, choke, giggle, gasp] and they'll really stick it to the old ladies and disabled children and all they other moochers. That's how you show Davids Gregory and Brooks that you're tough-minded and not some librul wimp!

That paragraph and this immediately following one is pretty far down in the article, but they are there:

It's no accident that CEOs are the one group that Simpson and Bowles have managed to convince. The surest way to fix the debt is to make deep cuts now, even if that hurts people who depend on government help. That bottom-line way of thinking would make intrinsic sense to a chief executive, who, if presented with a similar situation in his own business, would surely act before the problem spiraled out of control. [my emphasis]

This is also very revealing:

Antitax Republicans, not consensus-minded wise men, have led the budget battles of the last three years. Their overriding goal is not to shrink the deficit, but to stop tax increases. To these Republicans, Simpson’s party credentials are meaningless. Conservatives in Congress regard him as a dinosaur who epitomizes the moderate establishment they’ve sworn to defeat. "His name never comes up," says Grover Norquist, the antitax activist. "Simpson’s sole purpose is giving cover to Democrats to be for something that reduces the deficit." [my emphasis]

And this paragraph depicts is a very brief form what kind of nasty old coot is supposed to be providing cover for corporate Democrats like Obama-Brüning to cut benefits on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid:

Long before Obama set up the Simpson-Bowles commission, Clinton established the Kerrey-Danforth commission, which shared the same goal, offered many of the same prescriptions, even shared Simpson as a member—and met the same fate. "We came right at the entitlement programs," Simpson recalls, "which just pissed everybody off, and nobody did anything. Because when you mess with entitlements you get the emotional response that you're" — here he makes a face and pretends to cry — "hurting seniors, precious seniors, poor old ladies." He snorts in disgust. [my emphasis]

And if that doesn't tell you enough about Alan Simpson, this will help:

His relatives probably should have had a serious talk with him about five or ten years ago about how he really shouldn't be going out in public talking and stuff.

Tags: austerity economics, barack obama, comprehensive immigration reform, grand bargain, gun regulation, medicaid, medicare, social security

Digby catches Bob Woodward revealing news, despite himself

Bob Woodward is in the news today because he's playing the drama queen over an e-mail he got from White House economic adviser Gene Sperling. But Digby notices something important in this Politico report, Exclusive: The Woodward, Sperling emails revealed by Mike Allen and Jim Vadehei 02/28/2013. Sperling wrote to Woodward:

The idea that the sequester was to force both sides to go back to try at a big or grand barain with a mix of entitlements and revenues (even if there were serious disagreements on composition) was part of the DNA of the thing from the start. It was an accepted part of the understanding — from the start. Really. It was assumed by the Rs on the Supercommittee that came right after: it was assumed in the November-December 2012 negotiations. There may have been big disagreements over rates and ratios — but that it was supposed to be replaced by entitlements and revenues of some form is not controversial. (Indeed, the discretionary savings amount from the Boehner-Obama negotiations were locked in in BCA: the sequester was just designed to force all back to table on entitlements and revenues.)

Digby noticed that there was actually something more newsworthy here than Bob Woodward's silly whining. As she writes in Cutting entitlements is "in the DNA" of the sequester Hullabaloo 02/28/2013:

I don't know that anyone's ever admitted that in public before or that the president was completely, shall we say, honest when he ran for his second term about that specific definition of "a balanced approach". I haven't heard anyone say publicly that the sequester "deal" as far as the White House was concerned was to cut "entitlements" in exchange for new revenues. I wonder how many members of congress were aware of this "deal" when they voted for the sequester? The public certainly wasn't.

I wish I could understand why it is so important to Barack Obama to cut these vital programs before he leaves office. It seems to be his obsession. But there you have it.

Digby has been following Obama's Grand Obsession for the Grand Bargain to cut benefits on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid since his election as President in 2008. It's a persistent theme for him and there's no reason at this point to think that it won't be a four-year fight in his second term to prevent cuts in benefits to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

Bill Black writes in Why Obama Refuses to Kill the Sequester Bezinga 02/25/2013:

Similarly, President Obama has revealed his real preferences in the current blame game by not calling for a clean bill eliminating the Sequester. It is striking that as far as I know (1) neither Obama nor any administration official has called for the elimination of the Sequester and (2) we have a fairly silly blame game about how the Sequester was created without discussing the implications of Obama's continuing failure to call for the elimination of the Sequester despite his knowledge that it is highly self-destructive.

The only logical inference that can be drawn is that Obama remains committed to inflicting the "Grand Bargain" (really, the Grand Betrayal) on the Nation in his quest for a "legacy" and continues to believe that the Sequester provides him the essential leverage he feels he needs to coerce Senate progressives to adopt austerity, make deep cuts in vital social programs, and to begin to unravel the safety net. Obama’s newest budget offer includes cuts to the safety net and provides that 2/3 of the austerity inflicted would consist of spending cuts instead of tax increases. When that package is one’s starting position the end result of any deal will be far worse. [my emphasis]

Sperling's e-mail to Woodward is documentation that Black's suspicion on the Grand Bargain/Grand Betrayal are well-founded.

Tags: austerity economics, barack obama, comprehensive immigration reform, grand bargain, gun regulation, medicaid, medicare, social security

Private prisons, the gun lobby and the Obama Administration

Ana Kasparian and Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks talks about one of the most scandalous and destructive aspects of what we still call our "justice" system in the United States in For-Profit Prison Gets Name on Football Stadium 02/20/2013 02/20/2013.

They start talking at around 2:35 about the large amounts being spent by the federal government to detain suspected undocumented immigrants in private prisons.

One major factor with private prisons is that they can use various financial contributions to lobby (or just buy) politicians to pass tougher laws so that more people will go to prison so that they can make more money from the public till while they are cutting every cost they can get away with cutting to improve profits.

Tim Murphy reported earlier this month about how the radical-right National Rifle Association (NRA) and the for-profit prison industry share an interest in putting more and more people in jail in The Big House That Wayne LaPierre Built Mother Jones 02/08/2013. Fr the NRA, making more and more acts criminal allows them to use fear of crime to sell guns and ammunition. For the for-profit prison industry, it lets them make money from the taxpayers by housing the prisoners resulting from tougher and tougher laws.

The campaign the NRA promoted in the 1990s, called CrimeStrike, for more laws to put more people in prison and for longer terms led to badly overcrowded prisons even with massive prison construction. And to more opportunity for the for-profit prison industry. Murphy writes:

The number of people serving time in state or federal prisons increased 100 percent between 1990 and 2005. But California and Texas, the two states where the NRA had expended the most capital, were the most striking examples. The Golden State's three-strikes law differed from most of the other 29 in that it applied to an exceedingly broad definition of what amounted to a "strike." Under its guidelines, nonviolent crimes — including, in one famous case, the filching of a slice of pizza — were enough to put someone behind bars for life. ...

The prisons became simultaneously more crowded and more expensive to maintain. Writing for the majority in 2011, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy noted that inmates in California were forced to live in "telephone-booth-sized cages without toilets," and often went more than a year without receiving medical attention. The state's corrections system, Kennedy argued, was "incompatible with the concept of human dignity and has no place in civilized society."

The consequence of California's reforms is that Texas now leads the nation in incarceration, with 154,000 people behind bars—more prisoners per capita than all but three countries. The construction boom addressed what criminal-justice watchdogs considered to be a serious problem: Violent felons were being released before they were even eligible for parole because there simply wasn't any room. But CrimeStrike and its allies did nothing to curb the underlying problem — a sentencing system that locked people up for the smallest of crimes, kept them there for a while, and openly mocked efforts to keep them from coming back.

All that's left of the NRA's prison-building arm 20 years later is a television show by the same name. Hosted by LaPierre, Crime Strike features weekly reenactments of gun owners defending their turf, with the mantra: "Take aim and fight back." But the program's legacy lives on in concrete ways.

Digby cites Murphy's article and observes (Authoritarian Freedom Fighters (yes, I'm talking about the NRA) Hullabaloo 02/24/2013):

This shows exactly what kind of people NRA followers really are. For all their talk of watering the tree of liberty with blood of tyrants, they are actually the worst kind of authoritarians. They're fine with government power when it comes to any police agency (not charged with gun regulation) and they cheer it enthusiastically when it imprisons large numbers of people they consider to be undesirable. The only powers they don't wish the government to have is the power to tax them for the cost of these authoritarian institutions or to regulate their personal firepower. And they downright love a man in uniform, whether a cop or a soldier. ...

Read the whole story at Mojo about the NRA's prison plan. And then contemplate the fact that the Democrats decided after the 2000 election that they couldn't possibly go against them ever again. (And people wonder why so many of us find the Democratic Party's "strategies" so contemptible.)

As Ana and Cenk note in their report, Obama was eager to facilitate the agenda of the xenophobes and the for-profit prison lobby, considerably exceeding the number of deportations that the Cheney-Bush Administration made in any comparable period. In the Grand Compromiser pose, this was justified by Obama's loyalists on the issue by saying it would convince Republicans that he was serious about border enforcement, and that would make them more open to compromise on immigration reform. They got the deportations, we'll see how many Republicans vote for any decent immigration reform bill.

The NRA and their supporting background chorus of gun fetishists would be an excellent target for Obama to discredit and thereby discredit much of the "culture war" rhetoric of which their positions are an integral part.

Brian Tashman reports in Gun Activists Warn Obama is Raising a Private Black Army to Massacre White Americans Right Wing Watch 02/22/2013 that the rhetoric from Gun Owners of America and its President Larry Pratt encourage even wilder rhetoric in the service of unlimited gun proliferation. Obama and the Democrats should be forcing the Republicans to either own or repudiate such characters. Obama seems to have little intention of doing so. But at least the focus on gun violence and the proliferation of guns and ammo is highlighting the crackpot extremism of groups like the NRA, the Gun Owners of America and their close Republican allies.

Tags: comprehensive immigration reform, culture war, gun proliferation, gun regulation, nra, radical right, wayne lapierre

US immigration reform and a "secure border"

Here are some recent comments by President Obama on immigration.

President Obama on Immigration Reform in a Google+ Hangout -- Part 1 02/21/2013:

President Obama on Immigration Reform in a Google+ Hangout -- Part 2 02/21/2013:

Aura Bogado provides some useful reality-based information on immigration in Five Things to Know About Immigration and Enforcement The Nation 02/20/2013. One issue on which she focuses is the dubious conduct of ICE:

The coming weeks promise more of the same between a White House that has already leaked its own plan, the Senate’s Gang of Eight that is apparently still crafting one, a reluctant House that may stall any efforts at comprehensive reform, a visible and vocal undocumented population that’s taking a seat at the table and advocates on all sides of the debate. Then, there’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, whose Border Patrol agents garnered nearly one million dollars in cash, vacation time and Home Depot gift card incentives to target people for deportation — including many US citizens. ICE officials and agents tend to make their own rules, and Obama hasn’t reined them in. ...

An information request revealed last week that ICE officials instructed agents to scour Department of Motor Vehicle databases for potential immigrants to detain. The request yielded several emails sent to and from David Venturella, who served as ICE’s assistant director between 2008 and 2012. During that time, the Center for Investigative Reporting explained that the private prison corporation, GEO Group, "pointed toward anticipated growth of federal detention, particularly immigrants." (You can read more about my visit to one such GEO Group facility last month here.) ICE’s Venturella appears in the same post, divulging that his agency would be requesting the construction of new detention centers. According to this LinkedIn profile, Venturella left his post at ICE to join the GEO Group in July.

This is a big reason why I have so little confidence in Obama's determination to get a decent immigration reform. But there is strong pressure for it now, so maybe he will be forced into supporting it. Because without serious pressure from the public and Democrats in Congress, he'll just make another lazy compromise and allow dubious conduct by ICE to continue unchallenged.

But I'm also concerned about the Administration's attempt to sell their success at supposedly securing the border as a good reason to have comprehensive immigration reform, a point that Bogado also emphasizes.

Elizabeth Dwoskin spells out an Administration-friendly case on this question in The U.S.-Mexico Border Got Secured. Problem Solved? Bloomberg Businessweek 02/21/2013:

The porous border has long been the Republicans’ main argument against reforming immigration laws. The last time Congress took up the issue, in 2007, it bogged down over the government’s inability to stop the flow of undocumented laborers. More than 850,000 people were caught trying to illegally cross the nearly 2,000-mile-long southern border from Mexico that year, and the number of Mexican immigrants living in the country illegally was at a 40-year peak, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. Even with the backing of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, President George W. Bush couldn’t persuade enough Republicans to support an immigration bill.

This time, those looking to revive concerns about a lawless border must contend with a far different set of facts: The line between Mexico and the U.S. is now more secure than it’s been in decades. Obama has poured money and resources into border security. In his first term, he spent $73 billion on immigration enforcement. That’s more than the budgets of all other federal law enforcement agencies—the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Secret Service, Drug Enforcement Administration, U.S. Marshals Service—combined, according to the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research group. (Bush spent $37.4 billion on immigration enforcement in his first term and $60 billion in his second.)

The dramatic escalation in enforcement, including the excesses of ICE, have presumably been a significant factor in the reported net zero immigration from Mexico. Dwoskin does point out how the drug violence in Mexico has contributed to the immigration decline, and least covers the journalistic bases in saying "it’s difficult to measure how much of the drop in illegal immigration is owed to this massive law enforcement effort. Some of the decline is the result of a soft U.S. economy that has fewer jobs to offer immigrants." (my emphasis) But the headline and the first paragraphs of the article leave a strong impression that enforcement is the primary factor.

It's likely that immigration will rise again once there is substantial improvement in the economies of US states along the border, an improvement that is already underway in California. Austerity economics at the national level is like to slow or even reverse that approval.

But one of the potential concessions Obama could make to anti-immigration Republicans is to make implementation of immigration reform dependent on some mechanism by which border-state governors have to certify border security. One pitch for such a bad compromise - essentially a poison-pill provision the Republicans could use to sabotage reform altogether - is for the Administration to argue with such a wonderful record in border enforcement, such a certification wouldn't be a problem.

This claim that escalated enforcement has successfully created a "secure border" is a tricky one that immigration reform advocates should watch carefully.

Tags: barack obama, comprehensive immigration reform