(This cannot be a bad thing): Defense Budget Cuts Would Limit Raises and Close Bases

January 26, 2012

By ELISABETH BUMILLER and THOM SHANKER

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon took the first major step toward shrinking its budget after a decade of war as it announced Thursday that it wanted to limit pay raises for troops, increase health insurance fees for military retirees and close bases in the United States.

Although the pay-raise limits were described as modest, and would not start until 2015, they are certain to ignite a political fight in Congress, which since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has almost always raised military salaries beyond what the Pentagon has recommended.

Increasing health insurance fees for retirees and closing bases are also fraught with political risk, particularly when Republican presidential candidates are charging that President Obama is debilitating the military.

Next year’s Pentagon budget is to be $525 billion, down from $531 billion this fiscal year. Even though the Defense Department has been called on to find $259 billion in cuts in the next five years — and $487 billion over the decade — its base budget (not counting the costs of Afghanistan or other wars) will rise to $567 billion by 2017. But when adjusted for inflation, the increases are small enough that they will amount to a slight cut of 1.6 percent of the Pentagon’s base budget over the next five years.

Nonetheless, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said he was working with about $500 billion less than he had anticipated having on hand through 2017, meaning that the Pentagon had to trim personnel and favorite high-profile weapons programs. “This has been tough work,” Mr. Panetta said at an hourlong news conference.

He said that the Army would be reduced over five years to 490,000 troops, down from a peak of 570,000, and that the Marines would be cut to 182,000, down from 202,000. (Ground forces would still be slightly larger than they were before 9/11.) The Pentagon initially will buy fewer F-35 Joint Strike Fighter stealth jets, which are not expected to be in service until at least 2017 and have the distinction of being one of the costliest weapons programs in history. In the Navy, 14 warships will be either retired early or built more slowly.

Both Mr. Panetta and Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who also addressed the news conference, repeatedly said that the United States would still maintain the strongest military in the world, an assessment that seemed aimed at Republicans as well as America’s adversaries. “Capability is more important than size,” General Dempsey said. He added that “this budget does not lead to a military in decline” and that “it is a military that can win any conflict, anywhere.”

Although all American combat troops have been out of Iraq since mid-December and the Obama administration is beginning to withdraw what had been more than 100,000 United States forces in Afghanistan, the Pentagon budget includes a request for $88.4 billion next year, above the $525 billion base budget, to pay for combat operations overseas. Mr. Panetta said that Afghanistan, where there are still 90,000 American troops, accounts for the bulk of that money. This year’s budget for combat operations overseas is $115 billion.

Pentagon officials did not specify what the limits would be on military pay increases in 2015 and beyond, when American troops are due to be home from Afghanistan, although they characterized the change as incremental — an acknowledgment of the political risk of having active and retired members of the armed forces bear the brunt of the budget cuts. “Let me be clear, nobody’s pay will be cut,” Mr. Panetta said.

Still, the defense secretary has also called military personnel costs “unsustainable.” The Pentagon currently spends $181 billion a year, nearly a third of its base budget, on military personnel: $107 billion for salaries and allowances, $50 billion for health care and $24 billion for retirement pay.

Military salaries have risen steadily since the Sept. 11 attacks, and officers have in many cases fared better than enlisted personnel.

A private first class with a family and three years’ experience deployed to a war zone took home $26,700 tax-free in 2001, compared with $36,000 today — an 11 percent raise over inflation. A lieutenant colonel with a family and 20 years’ experience deployed to the same war zone took home $84,000 tax-free in 2001, compared with $120,000 today — a 16 percent increase.

Posing another political challenge was Mr. Panetta’s announcement that the president would request another round of base closings and realignments — never popular with members of Congress who try to preserve military spending, and jobs, in their districts. Pentagon officials said savings from any base closings were not reflected in the five-year budget Mr. Panetta was sending to the White House.

There were already objections on Thursday morning, hours before Mr. Panetta made his public presentation. Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told reporters that until the United States shut down some of its bases in Europe, “I’m not going to be able to support” closing bases in America.

Mr. Panetta has said that two armored Army brigades — as many as 10,000 troops — would come home from Europe over the next decade, leaving two brigades and some support troops behind.

Although Mr. Obama has given an aspirational pledge to reduce the nation’s nuclear arsenal to zero, there was nothing in Thursday’s announcement about reaching that goal. All three legs of the nuclear triad — bombers, submarine-launched missiles and land-based missiles — will be preserved. The program to replace the Ohio class nuclear-missile submarine will be delayed by two years.

Mr. Panetta has repeatedly said that he would preserve financing for Special Operations forces, cyberwarfare and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance systems, and the budget makes good on that promise.

The Pentagon did not say how much health insurance fees would increase — the details are to come in early February. Families now pay $520 a year, far below the cost of a private carrier.

Criticism of the proposed budget came swiftly from senior Republicans on Capitol Hill.

“These cuts reflect President Obama’s vision of an America that is weakened, not strengthened, by our men and women in uniform,” said Howard P. McKeon of California, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. “To be clear, the impacts of these cuts are far deeper than Congress envisioned.”

Because he knows everything he wants to know the way he knows them (don't confuse me wid duh facts, as Geno Mendoza, the Choctow Indian / caddie master and first surrogate father figure of my life was so fond of saying): In Florida Debate, Gingrich Ignores Lessons of Recent History

JANUARY 27, 2012, 12:36 AM

By NATE SILVER

The two debates in Florida this week paralleled the two in South Carolina last week, only with the roles of Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney reversed.

Mr. Romney was defensive — and often evasive — in both of the South Carolina debates. Perhaps this strategy made sense at the first of the two in Myrtle Beach. Coming off a big win in New Hampshire, Mr. Romney held a lead in the South Carolina polls at the time and seemed to want to run out the clock. But voters did not react well to the strategy, while Mr. Gingrich had a strong evening. Polling showed the momentum in the race shifting to Mr. Gingrich almost literally overnight.

Rather than change gears, however, Mr. Romney adopted a similar plan at the next debate in Charleston. The result was the same: he continued to sink in the polls, turning a single-digit deficit in the South Carolina polls into a double-digit loss.

At Monday’s debate in Tampa, Fla., it was Mr. Gingrich who pulled his punches, adopting a subdued approach and declining opportunities to attack the other candidates. His strategy, like Mr. Romney’s a week earlier, perhaps looked good in the playbook: the initial polls after South Carolina had shown Mr. Gingrich surging to a lead in Florida, and perhaps Mr. Gingrich thought he could look more like a front-runner by adopting a less combative and more magnanimous approach.

But Republican voters, once more, did not react well: Mr. Gingrich has since lost considerable ground in the polls and now trails Mr. Romney in Florida. It is not necessarily clear that the debate was the only cause of this. Nevertheless, Mr. Gingrich entered Thursday evening trailing Mr. Romney in the polls and needing a win in the second debate.

Instead, Mr. Gingrich seemed to be playing for a draw. He passed upon several opportunities to push back at Mr. Romney, despite being expressly presented with opportunities to do so — on health care, on Ronald Reagan’s legacy, on immigration, and on Mr. Romney’s personal finances among other issues. The only exception came when Mr. Gingrich alleged that Mr. Romney had invested in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — but this was met with a strong rebuttal by Mr. Romney, who seemed well prepared for the attack.

I strongly suspect that Mr. Gingrich will extend the losing streak for this passive debate strategy. There aren’t any post-debate polls yet, but the betting market Intrademight provide a preview of them. By the time the evening was done, Mr. Gingrich’s chances of winning Florida had plummeted to 10 percent from 25 percent in the market, and his chances of winning the Republican nomination had dropped to about 5 percent from 10 percent.

The precipitous drop mirrored one for Gov. Rick Perry of Texas after his “oops” moment in a November debate. In this case, however, Mr. Gingrich had not committed any major gaffes. Instead, he adopted a poor strategy, failing to draw favorable contrasts with his opponents. It’s hard to win debates — and to win nominations — unless you make an effort to do that.

The FiveThirtyEight forecast of Florida envisions a wide array of potential outcomes because of the exceptional volatility in the polling there. Heading into the evening, Mr. Gingrich was projected to win 36 percent of the vote — but the confidence interval on his forecast ran from 22 percent to 47 percent.

Every now and then voters react much differently to a debate than pundits and analysts expect them to. But it seems to me like Mr. Gingrich is now at much greater risk of finishing toward the low end of the range, which could translate into something like a 20-point loss to Mr. Romney.

Frankly, were it not for the fact that a lot of people have already voted in Florida and that a super PAC associated with Mr. Gingrich will be running a significant number of commercials on his behalf, you could make the case that Mr. Gingrich was in some danger of finishing out of the top two. Rick Santorum, in third place in the Florida polls, performed quite well at the debate and could finish toward the top end of his forecast range, which runs up to about 20 percent of the vote.

With an outcome like that, it could be Mr. Santorum who emerges as the strongest challenger to Mr. Romney, albeit one with fairly remote chances of winning.

Mr. Santorum avoids two of Mr. Gingrich’s greater liabilities. He is not as disliked by influential Republicans — in fact, Mr. Santorum has pockets of support from some key constituencies. And Mr. Santorum can probably make a stronger case on the electability front. Right now, all of the remaining Republicans have net-negative favorability ratings with the general public. But Mr. Santorum’s score — a favorability rating of 30 percent and an unfavorable rating of 36 percent in an average of recent polls — is somewhat better than Mr. Romney’s and much better than Mr. Gingrich’s.

Would, say, an unexpectedly strong third-place showing by Mr. Santorum be enough to sustain his campaign? Perhaps, particularly if Mr. Gingrich does poorly enough that the viability of his campaign is called into question. The path forward would not be easy for Mr. Santorum, especially given that he would be at something of a delegate deficit to Mr. Romney. But Mr. Santorum could focus on two Midwestern states that are key in the general election — Michigan, which votes on Feb. 28, and Ohio, which votes on March 6. If there is truly an appetite for a “not Romney” candidate, then a state like Ohio would provide as good a testing ground as any.

Still, if the most interesting question after Florida votes on Tuesday is whether Mr. Santorum’s third-place finish is enough to keep him alive, that would qualify as an outstanding evening for Mr. Romney, who had come into Thursday night still at considerable risk of losing the state.

Mr. Romney, who performed well in the Thursday debate, can thank his new debate coach, Brett O’Donnell. But he can also thank Mr. Gingrich, who acted as though he was content to settle for second place. Recent history has shown that candidates who act that way usually get their wish.

He's always been a mean-spirited, petulant, solipsistic man: Gingrich Stuck to Caustic Path in Ethics Battles

January 26, 2012

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON — Newt Gingrich had an urgent warning for conservatives: Jim Wright, the Democratic speaker of the House, was out to destroy America.

It was April 1988, a month before Mr. Gingrich, an up-and-coming Republican congressman, shocked colleagues by pressing ethics charges against the powerful Mr. Wright. Now, he was singling out the speaker as a major obstacle in a coming “civil war” with liberals.

“This war has to be fought with a scale and a duration and a savagery that is only true of civil wars,” Mr. Gingrich said, in a speech to the conservative Heritage Foundation. He branded Mr. Wright as part of “the hard left,” whose members, he warned, “will try by chameleon-like actions to destroy our country.”

The brutal civil war Mr. Gingrich predicted did indeed come to pass, during a nearly decadelong conflict in which ethics charges were the primary weapon. Mr. Gingrich lodged a complaint against Mr. Wright, which cost the Democratic speaker his job. Democrats, in turn, bombarded Mr. Gingrich with accusations of ethical impropriety, which led to a $300,000 fine and a reprimand for bringing discredit to the House.

Mr. Gingrich, Democrats and Republicans here agree, emerged as one of Washington’s most aggressive practitioners of slash-and-burn politics; many fault him for erasing whatever civility once existed in the capital. He believed, and preached, that harsh language could win elections; in 1990, the political action committee he ran, Gopac, instructed Republican candidates to learn to “speak like Newt,” and offered a list of words to describe Democrats — like decay, traitors, radical, sick, destroy, pathetic, corrupt and shame.

Those same qualities are now on display as Mr. Gingrich, a Republican candidate for president, turns his caustic tongue against Republicans and Democrats alike. He has tried to cut down Mitt Romney as promoting “pious baloney,” branded President Obama “the food stamp president” and mocked him for living on “Planet Obama.” He has gone after the “elite media” as well, denouncing the “destructive, vicious, negative nature” of those whose questions he does not like.

On the campaign trail, Mr. Gingrich, whose spokesman did not return calls or e-mails seeking comment for this article, promotes himself as an elder Republican statesman, often reminding voters that as House speaker, he worked with a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, to balance the budget and overhaul the welfare system.

But he neglects to mention that he also presided over Mr. Clinton’s impeachment (which later provoked charges of hypocrisy, because the case concerned Mr. Clinton’s adulterous behavior while Mr. Gingrich himself was having an extramarital affair) or that his bombastic style helped cost him his speakership; he stepped down in 1999.

Mr. Gingrich’s recent surge in the polls makes leading Republicans nervous; one, Bob Dole of Kansas, the former Senate majority leader, endorsed Mr. Romney on Thursday, saying Mr. Gingrich “loved picking a fight.” And his history of combat with Democrats — “the enemy of normal Americans,” Mr. Gingrich once called them — leads people in both parties to wonder if he could work in a bipartisan way.

“Government is dysfunctional because the presidency and Congress no longer have the ability to compromise, and I put Newt at the heart of that,” said Mickey Edwards, a Republican former congressman from Oklahoma who served in leadership alongside Mr. Gingrich, and who is neutral in the Republican primary.

“When he was in the House,” Mr. Edwards added, “he had some temptation to work across party lines because he wanted to be considered an equal with Bill Clinton. But I think if you were in a position where Newt had the upper hand as president, his style would not be to find a way to compromise, but to turn up the heat on Democrats.”

Ethics as a Weapon

Mr. Gingrich arrived on Capitol Hill in January 1979, as a freshman Republican from Georgia, having already made ethics an issue in his first political campaigns.

Once in Washington, Mr. Gingrich found an obvious target: Representative Charles C. Diggs, a Michigan Democrat and founder of the Congressional Black Caucus who had been convicted of taking kickbacks from staff members but re-elected while awaiting sentencing. Most newcomers to Congress would have remained silent on a delicate matter involving a senior member. But Mr. Gingrich led the charge to expel Mr. Diggs, confiding to one close colleague that it was a “gutsy thing to do,” because he risked accusations of racism. The House eventually censured Mr. Diggs, and he quit in disgrace.

Over time, Mr. Gingrich sought to make ethics his signature issue, an effort aimed mostly at Democrats.

He pushed for, and won, harsher punishment for two lawmakers, one a Republican and one a Democrat, who were accused of sexual misconduct. He railed against Democrats over a disputed election in Indiana, accusing them of stealing the seat, and maneuvered quietly behind the scenes to orchestrate the work of the so-called Gang of Seven, which in the early 1990s created a ruckus over lawmakers’ overdrafts at the private House bank and other Congressional perks. He called for the censure of Representative Barney Frank, the Massachusetts Democrat, over ethical breaches involving the use of his office to help a male prostitute. Mr. Frank received a lesser reprimand instead.

“Newt,” Mr. Frank says today, “is the single most influential factor in replacing the politics in which you accepted the bona fides of your opponents and disagreed with them civilly with the politics of insisting that your opponents are bad people.”

Mr. Gingrich has said he was on a mission to “repair the integrity of the House,” but critics are skeptical. Fred Wertheimer, then the head of Common Cause, says Mr. Gingrich saw ethics charges as “a vehicle for destroying the House as an institution and taking over what was left.”

But Steven M. Gillon, a University of Oklahoma historian who has written a book about Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Clinton, offers another explanation. Southern Republicans in the post-civil rights era often used race as a wedge issue, Mr. Gillon said. But Mr. Gingrich, a one-time Rockefeller Republican who embraced integration, needed a different line of attack. “He needed to find a wedge that would undermine the moral credibility of the Democratic Party,” Mr. Gillon said, adding, “He could use ethics as sort of a bludgeon, and that’s what he did.”

Empty House, Big Microphone

Mr. Gingrich’s arrival in Congress coincided with the rise of C-Span, the cable channel that televised House proceedings, and he figured out early on how to combine his gift for oratory with the power of the camera. Night after night, he would lambaste Democrats, speaking in an empty House chamber after the day’s legislative business was done. Mr. Gingrich would needle Democrats, challenging them to come forward and defend themselves. No one did, because no one was there.

Things came to a head in May 1984, on a day when the chamber was full. Mr. Gingrich had been pounding a group of Democrats over a letter they had written to Daniel Ortega, the Nicaraguan leader, accusing them of spreading “communist propaganda.” Thomas P. O’Neill Jr., the House speaker, let loose.

“You deliberately stood in that well before an empty House, and challenged these people, and challenged their Americanism,” he roared, wagging his forefinger at Mr. Gingrich, “and it’s the lowest thing I’ve ever seen in my 32 years in Congress.”

It was a rare breach of decorum; Mr. Gingrich had gotten the better of Mr. O’Neill. House rules forbid personal insults, so Mr. O’Neill’s words were “taken down”— stricken from the record, a rare rebuke and a turning point, many here say, in relations between Republicans and Democrats.

“That was the moment he became a real star,” said John J. Pitney Jr., a professor at Claremont McKenna College, who has written extensively about Mr. Gingrich and polarization in Congress. “It was David taking on Goliath.”

Some Republicans were uneasy. Among them was Trent Lott of Mississippi, then the Republican whip. Mr. Lott had called for Mr. O’Neill’s remarks to be stricken. Even so, he says he was uncomfortable with Mr. Gingrich’s take-no-prisoners rhetorical style.

“Newt was willing to tear up the system to get the majority,” Mr. Lott, who supports Mitt Romney, said in an interview last year, before Mr. Gingrich’s recent surge in the polls. “It got to be a really negative pit over there, but that was probably the beginnings of the Republicans being able to take control.”

A Fight Becomes a War

August 1987 was a “decisive moment” for Mr. Gingrich, he wrote in his 1998 mea culpa book, “Lessons Learned the Hard Way.” It was when he began to view his fight with Democrats as a civil war. “One culture or the other,” he wrote, “would have to go.”

By this time, Mr. Gingrich had already taken charge of Gopac, a once-sleepy political action committee dedicated to electing Republicans. Mr. Gingrich pumped it up into a fund-raising machine and a training organization in which Republican candidates were given step-by-step information on how to run for office. He produced seminars and a series of cassette tapes; today hundreds, if not thousands, of Republican officeholders in states around the country can recall riding around in their cars listening to Mr. Gingrich’s formula for winning.

Mr. Edwards, the former Republican congressman, described the tapes as “all about how to demonize the opposition, how to use invective and scary language,” adding: “It wasn’t that he trained them to have a better understanding of foreign policy, or economic policy. They were techniques in how to wage a nasty partisan war against your opponent.”

By August 1987, that opponent, for Mr. Gingrich at least, was Mr. Wright, the House speaker, whom he viewed as covering for the corrupt Democratic Party.

Mr. Gingrich spent more than a year making speeches against Mr. Wright, branding him “the least ethical speaker of the 20th century.” The charge that finally stuck involved a vanity book, “Reflections of a Public Man,” that Mr. Wright sold in bulk to lobbyists and supporters, under an unusual agreement for him to receive 55% of the royalties. (Years later, Mr. Gingrich would come under attack for his own book deal.)

The House Ethics Committee found “reason to believe” that Mr. Wright had violated House rules in 69 instances; seeking to avoid a drawn out disciplinary hearing, he resigned in June 1989, giving Mr. Gingrich his biggest Democratic scalp.

“He was as partisan as Newt was partisan,” Wilma Goldstein, a former Republican National Committee official who worked closely with Mr. Gingrich, said of Mr. Wright. “So Newt just decided, ‘By God, if we’re going to take them down, let’s start at the top.’ ”

But again, some Republicans were uncomfortable. Mr. Gingrich, by then the Republican whip, was clearly angling to replace the House Republican leader, Robert H. Michel, viewed by many in his party as too accommodating to Democrats. Mr. Michel, now 88, recalls warning Mr. Gingrich that what goes around comes around.

“I would say, ‘Newt, these fellows over there are not our enemy, they’re our political adversaries,’ ” Mr. Michel said. He reminded him that Democrats and Republicans often traded places in leadership. “That could happen to you,” Mr. Michel recalled saying. “If you don’t treat them with respect, boy, the next time around, they have a chance to really put the shivs to you.”

Time for Payback

Mr. Michel, it turned out, was right.

Mr. Gingrich climbed his way to the speakership in January 1995, and once he got there vowed to take the high road. He had spent years labeling Democrats as “counterculture” proponents of the “liberal welfare state,” and in 1994 went so far as to suggest the case of Susan Smith, a South Carolina mother who murdered her two sons, was evidence of “how sick the society is getting and how much we need to change things” by electing Republicans.

But once in power, he pledged to work cooperatively with Mr. Clinton, explaining that being in the majority freed him to be more conciliatory. “In the minority,” he said then, “it’s like the defense in football. You’re in a different position. You have to be more combative.”

It was too late. Democrats were already bombarding him with ethics charges. During his bid for re-election, Mr. Gingrich’s opponent filed a complaint accusing him of using a college course, “Renewing American Civilization,” to promote a partisan agenda, improperly mixing Gopac money with public funds.

And once he won, Mr. Gingrich came under withering criticism for a $4.5 million book advance from HarperCollins, whose owner, Rupert Murdoch, had business pending before the Congress. Under pressure, Mr. Gingrich turned down the advance. (His defense was that unlike Mr. Wright, he was writing “a real book.”)

Over the course of two years, more than 80 charges — ranging from alleged tax violations to complaints that he used Gopac money to finance one of his own campaigns — were filed against Mr. Gingrich with the House Ethics Committee. The convoluted inquiry consumed official Washington, with Democrats saying he was getting what he deserved and Republicans calling it a political vendetta.

“Yes, he filed ethics charges against Speaker Wright, and I would concede that it wasn’t just because Newt was out to clean up Congress,” said Dan Meyer, a former Gingrich aide. “I think he used it as a partisan tactic, but the scale of the response was way out of proportion.”

In the end, nearly all of the charges were dismissed. But the ethics committee did find that Mr. Gingrich had used tax-exempt money to promote Republican goals, and given the panel inaccurate information for its inquiry.

Mr. Gingrich formally apologized, conceding he had brought discredit on the House. He had always   regarded himself as a “transformative figure” who would change the course of history, but on Jan. 21, 1997, he made history in another way.

The House voted 395-28 to reprimand him and fine him $300,000, making him the first speaker ever disciplined for unethical conduct.

Bobo sounds the alarms - suggest Obama needs to form a center-left coalition - but who in the world is on the left that has been elected to national politifal office?

January 26, 2012

Hope, but Not Much Change

By 

DAVID BROOKS

The Simpson-Bowles report wasn’t just a policy document. For a few months, it expanded the national debate. Everybody seemed to realize that the country was beset by large challenges that could no longer be neglected: soaring debt, lagging growth, wage stagnation, family breakdown, political dysfunction (uneccessary wars of choice, out-of-control medicare and medicaid expenditures which IBM believes it could cut by 90%, incarceration of 2,000,000 of its citizens, poverty abounding, the infrastructure to end homelessness over night, but the lack of political resolve to do a damn thing about it, children going to bed hungry, poverty, a narco-state where drug-dealing is very lucrative and with ever fewer jobs available to high-school and college age students a very much attractive illicit drug trade looms as a viable option, high school boards mandating that nonsense be taught in place of science, the U.S. government waging a propaganda war upon the U.S. population, White House endorsed torture of war captives, tax loop holes for the uber-rich and for corporations .... these of course, CAN be neglected, since they ain't included in BOBO's mostly phoned in column).

Suddenly, there was a sense of urgency. There were grand plans coming from all directions.

SUDDENLY, there was a sense of urgency -- wait, you think back in the bail out days of Goldman Sachs, there was no sense of urgency - it was SO damn urgent that the President Elect, before he officially took office took it upon himself to take up the TARP plan to bail out the banks (and other large corporations)

A bipartisan group of 65 senators gathered to think about government afresh. The Times had a fantastic online budget calculator to let readers reinvent government according to their own priorities.

The Peter G. Peterson Foundation asked six think tanks from across the political spectrum to offer fiscal solutions. The proposals teemed with big ideas: fundamental tax reform that would simplify the code and boost growth; fundamental entitlement reform to restrain cost; doubling spending on science, pre-K education and adult retraining; taxing fossil fuels to spur innovation; shifting from a consumption-led to an investment-led economy.

It’s sad to compare that era of bigness to the medium-sized policy morsels that President Obama put in his State of the Union address. He had some big themes in the speech, but the policies were mere appetizers. The Republicans absurdly call Obama a European socialist on the stump, but the Obama we saw Tuesday night was a liberal incrementalist.

There was nothing big, like tax reform or entitlement (when BOBO or his fellow stenographers say "entitlement" they invariable fail to note that the REASON people, citizens, human beings, are ENTITLED to these benefits is that THEY HAVE PAID FOR THEM, they have been promised these benefits, and, when you pay for something you have been promised, you are ENTITLED TO EXPECT that you will get that which you were promised; this is foundational) reform. There was no comprehensive effort to restore trust in government by sweeping away the tax credits and special-interest schemes that entangle Washington. Ninety percent of American workers work in the service economy, but Obama spoke mostly about manufacturing.

Instead, there were a series of modest proposals that poll well. In that sense, it was the Democratic version of Newt Gingrich’s original “Contract With America” — a series of medium-size ideas with 80 percent approval ratings (I have been making this point, it seems like - the point that all Democrats do once they are elected Preznit is to cut the social benefits, wage harder-fought wars to prove their manhood.

Some of Obama’s ideas are outstanding. Presidential nominees should get an up-or-down vote within 90 days. We should connect community colleges more closely with labor markets. We should raise the income tax rates for millionaires back to Clinton-era levels. We should responsibly promote fracking to develop natural gas.

Some of the ideas were lamentable. Instead of simplifying the tax code, Obama would muddy it up with more tax loopholes for corporations as long as they conformed to this or that industrial policy.

Some of the ideas were just inexplicable. Is the government really going to defund Ivy League science labs if Ivy League colleges raise their tuitions?

But the core point is that these policies are incremental, not transformational. You could pass them all and the country might be slightly better off or slightly worse off, but it wouldn’t be on a different trajectory.

It’s odd that an administration that once wanted to do everything all at once now should be so gradualist. Maybe its members were scarred by the traumas of health care and the 2010 election. Maybe they just want to win the election, so every policy has to be politically easy instead of politically challenging.

Maybe the president’s aides believe that most of our problems are overhyped. I have heard them hint that in dozens of interviews. To balance the budget, we only need to bend revenues and taxes a bit. To compete with China, we only need to shift the playing field a bit.

Maybe the president’s cautious tendencies are just coming out.

In normal times, that sober, incremental approach would be admirable. In normal times, the best sort of change is gradual, flexible and constant. But these are not normal times. This is not Clinton’s second term, or Eisenhower’s. The fiscal train wreck is coming. The current U.S. growth model is insufficient. The American family and the American political system are cracking up.

Legislatively, the president has to build a center-left governing majority that can overwhelm those Republicans who will never support him. That can be done only with ground-shifting policies. Politically, the president has to resonate with voters who feel the country is on the wrong track. Prudentially, the president has to prepare for the likelihood that the economy is going to hit another rough patch this year — if Greece leaves the euro or if the French banks implode or if the Iranian crisis comes to a head. If any of that happens, the desire for profound change would be overwhelming and the candidate with a few carefully targeted tax credits would get blown away.

This election is about averting national decline. The president is making a mistake in ceding the size advantage to the Republicans. The Republicans at least speak with epic alarm about the nation’s problems. They are unified behind big tax and welfare state reforms that would purge Washington and shake things up.

The president is making a mistake in running a Sunset Boulevard campaign: I am big; it’s my presidency that got small.

Jobs, Jobs and Cars

January 26, 2012

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Mitch Daniels, the former Bush budget director who is now Indiana’s governor, made the Republicans’ reply to President Obama’s State of the Union address. His performance was, well, boring. But he did say something thought-provoking — and I mean that in the worst way.

For Mr. Daniels tried to wrap his party in the mantle of the late Steve Jobs, whom he portrayed as a great job creator — which is one thing that Jobs definitely wasn’t. And if we ask why Apple has created so few American jobs, we get an insight into what is wrong with the ideology dominating much of our politics.

Mr. Daniels first berated the president for his “constant disparagement of people in business,” which happens to be a complete fabrication. Mr. Obama has never done anything of the sort. He went on: “The late Steve Jobs — what a fitting name he had — created more of them than all those stimulus dollars the president borrowed and blew.”

Clearly, Mr. Daniels doesn’t have much of a future in the humor business. But, more to the point, anyone who reads The New York Times knows that his assertion about job creation was completely false: Apple employs very few people in this country.

A big report in The Times last Sunday laid out the facts. Although Apple is now America’s biggest U.S. corporation as measured by market value, it employs only 43,000 people in the United States, a tenth as many as General Motors employed when it was the largest American firm.

Apple does, however, indirectly employ around 700,000 people in its various suppliers. Unfortunately, almost none of those people are in America.

Why does Apple manufacture abroad, and especially in China? As the article explained, it’s not just about low wages. China also derives big advantages from the fact that so much of the supply chain is already there. A former Apple executive explained: “You need a thousand rubber gaskets? That’s the factory next door. You need a million screws? That factory is a block away.”

This is familiar territory to students of economic geography: the advantages of industrial clusters — in which producers, specialized suppliers, and workers huddle together to their mutual benefit — have been a running theme since the 19th century.

And Chinese manufacturing isn’t the only conspicuous example of these advantages in the modern world. Germany remains a highly successful exporter even with workers who cost, on average, $44 an hour — much more than the average cost of American workers. And this success has a lot to do with the support its small and medium-sized companies — the famed Mittelstand — provide to each other via shared suppliers and the maintenance of a skilled work force.

The point is that successful companies — or, at any rate, companies that make a large contribution to a nation’s economy — don’t exist in isolation. Prosperity depends on the synergy between companies, on the cluster, not the individual entrepreneur.

But the current Republican worldview has no room for such considerations. From the G.O.P.’s perspective, it’s all about the heroic entrepreneur, the John Galt, I mean Steve Jobs-type “job creator” who showers benefits on the rest of us and who must, of course, be rewarded with tax rates lower than those paid by many middle-class workers.

And this vision helps explain why Republicans were so furiously opposed to the single most successful policy initiative of recent years: the auto industry bailout.

The case for this bailout — which Mr. Daniels has denounced as “crony capitalism” — rested crucially on the notion that the survival of any one firm in the industry depended on the survival of the broader industry “ecology” created by the cluster of producers and suppliers in America’s industrial heartland. If G.M. and Chrysler had been allowed to go under, they would probably have taken much of the supply chain with them — and Ford would have gone the same way.

Fortunately, the Obama administration didn’t let that happen, and the unemployment rate in Michigan, which hit 14.1 percent as the bailout was going into effect, is now down to a still-terrible-but-much-better 9.3 percent. And the details aside, much of Mr. Obama’s State of the Union address can be read as an attempt to apply the lessons of that success more broadly.

So we should be grateful to Mr. Daniels for his remarks Tuesday. He got his facts wrong, but he did, unintentionally, manage to highlight an important philosophical difference between the parties. One side believes that economies succeed solely thanks to heroic entrepreneurs; the other has nothing against entrepreneurs, but believes that entrepreneurs need a supportive environment, and that sometimes government has to help create or sustain that supportive environment.

And the view that it takes more than business heroes is the one that fits the facts.

Envy is the Illusion

The Other Side of the Tracks By Perry Redd BlackCommentator.com Columnist

Have you heard the latest buzzword? It’s more akin to an allegation. As we bear witness to the Republicans vying for the opportunity to face incumbent Barack Obama for the presidency, “The Politics of Envy” has become the allegation placed against anyone who might call a fact a fact or a truth a truth. The fact is that there is a grand inequality of wealth in this country. It is also fact that many with great wealth have executed great measures to prohibit others from the opportunity to gain a part of this nation’s wealth. Another fact is that there have been concerted efforts to deceive non-wealthy Americans to think that ultra wealthy people have worked - just like anyone else - to achieve that wealth; if anyone questions that premise, they are accused of playing “the politics of envy.” It is disingenuous of any rich person who would categorically posit that anyone that questions wealth gain is envious. Most Americans admire people who have amassed great wealth (why, I’ll never know! (Nor will I - one must always consider how that money was accumulated; invariably, it was stolen, either directly, or by paying slave wages and less)). The fact is that one generally questions wealth after the wealthy person states that he/she has “earned it.” People want to see what that looks like.It is disingenuous of any rich person who would categorically posit that anyone has “earned it.” People want to see what that looks like. Most working class people want to emulate the formula that worked. Did they save their dimes and skip meals to amass that kind of wealth? Did they put half of their paycheck in money market accounts and move in with their mother? What exactly did rich people do to get rich? When Republican primary candidate, Mitt Romney, gave his acceptance speech after presumably winning the New Hampshire primary, Romney called President Barack Obama, “a leader who divides us with the bitter politics of envy.” Romney was referring to the president’s comments about fairness and income inequality, the 1% versus 99% argument. Rather than show any compassion on the subject, the next day, Romney defended his “politics of envy” comment on The Today Show. “I think it’s fine to talk about those things in quiet rooms,” the former governor said, “But the president has made it part of his campaign rally. Everywhere he goes we hear him talking about millionaires and billionaires and executives and Wall Street. It’s a very envy-oriented, attack-oriented approach and I think it will fail.” By “quiet rooms” does Romney mean boardrooms and country clubs? Romney must understand that people talk about greed of Wall Street and insane profits of corporations in the face of ridiculously high unemployment and record home foreclosures; and they’re talking about it loud and in public - say, the Occupy Wall Street movement? I find it virtually absurd to even consider registering my vote for someone who cannot begin to see that a healthy economy is based on consumer spending. When people within a society don’t possess money to spend on goods and services, then an economy becomes crippled. When one person makes $42.6 million in the span of two years, I immediately think to myself the number of working class salaries that could be! I think, “how many $30,000/year salaries could that be?” Actually, that’s 1,420 people that could be employed at a living wage! That could help heal the American economy. Because I see the inequality of that picture, doesn’t make me envious; it may make me mad. Envy doesn’t even paint an accurate picture. So why the phrase? It’s because the person in the superior role must attack the victim to excuse his/her greed. Anger at the fact that Romney pays a lesser tax rate than most rich people, is reasonable if nothing else. Over two years, Romney’s effective tax rate - the percentage of his income that he owed in federal income taxes - was just under 14%. Nevertheless, and contrary to popular perception, Romney’s effective federal income tax rate is still above that of many Americans - 80% of whom have an effective rate below 15%. That tax rate is higher when other federal taxes - such as the payroll tax - are included. The reason Romney’s rate is so low - despite having one of the highest incomes in the country - is because his income is derived almost entirely from capital gains and dividends from his extensive portfolio of investments. And that form of investment income is typically taxed at just 15%, well below the 35% top tax rate for high earners. It’s not envy that questions this inequality, it’s anger. Or at least, it should be. The main people that will vote for Romney will be low to middle income earners, people who are unsure of their employment or mortgage. People who are paying a higher percentage of their incomes on gas, utilities and other necessities. These people will choose to elect a person who cannot even begin to identify with struggling to make a monthly budget or sacrificing to send a child to college. Why would someone vote for that? Because, racist loyalty will cause one to vote against his/her own interest. I beg you not to be that person. Don’t vote against your interests. A candidate might look attractive, but realize that money has no friends. From his years as a venture capitalist, Romney has shown that money is more important than people. I bet you he has more money than friends…to believe anything otherwise is all but an illusion. BlackCommentator.com Columnist, Perry Redd, is the former Executive Director of the workers rights advocacy, Sincere Seven, and author of the on-line commentary, “The Other Side of the Tracks.” He is the host of the internet-based talk radio show, Socially Speaking in Washington, DC. Click here to contact Mr. Redd.

State Of The Union: The Only Time Congress Deals In Virtual Reality (This is a very favorable review of Obama's State of the Nation Address - I find Dr Samad's facts and logic impeccable!)

Between The Lines By Dr. Anthony Asadullah Samad, PhD BlackCommentator.com Columnist

Watching the President of the United States give a State of the Union address is often like watching a peacock strut. (This is quite an astute, and by my reckoning, original observation) Its head projecting forward with each step, and its splayed feathers saying “Look at me. I’m tall. I’m beautiful. I have it all. I did it all.” The President usually lists an embellished log of accomplishments and forecasts a list of unreasonable - if not unachievable - expectations. Then Congress comes back and peacocks what it has done. The President and Congress, like the peacock, claims it can do everything - but fly. In fact, the peacock struts because it can’t fly. Well, this week, the President flew as Congress attempted to strut. President Barack Obama laid out the reality of our nation, his accomplishments despite obstruction, in front of Congress and the nation. He did it in real time, in virtual reality, in jaw-dropping fashion. The 2012 State of the Union offered a vast contrast to the picture of the nation the Republican candidates running in the GOP primaries have painted. The President offered a different picture of the nation’s political and social realities than the Congress has held up. The American people don’t know what to think about the state of its nation and the mental state of its leaders because they get a different spin from all directions. Nothing is good enough. Nothing is right. The other party is always wrong. Reality is never real. And as the nation witnessed in 2011, the Congress is delusional. However, the week…the nation got a true dose of reality. Now, I’m not saying that I agreed with everything the President laid out…particularly about the Iran piece. I believe he’s being walked into a trap on that tip…but I do believe he is trying to construct a virtual reality for the type of government we currently have and the limitations its poses when you have ideologues and millionaires running the government who have distorted realities about the socio-economic conditions in which most people live in our nation. The President held up a mirror to Congress this week. Hopefully it was as ugly to them as it has been to the rest of us. Congress has painted itself into a corner, largely because the ideologues don’t understand the role of government beyond self-interested motives and rhetorical retraction. Rhetorical retraction simply means they think they have to move backwards to take the nation forward. We know its empty rhetoric. They know its empty rhetoric and the President showed it was empty rhetoric. The politics of political gamesman was really the subject of the State of the Union. That is the state of the union, virtually. In a very literal sense, the President laid out what has been, what is, and what could have been had Congress not played with the lives of the American people. He asked Congress what reality are they looking at - what reality do they really see? Is it the same one as the American people, or is it a contrived reality for the privileged and the socially impolitic. Both, of course, represent what the GOP is presenting as their best options to Obama in Romney and Gingrich. The President called for Congress to be fair to the American people. The GOP wants to just be fair to the rich. What they are calling “class warfare,” as the President noted, the rest of the nation calls “common sense.” For most us, common sense is virtual reality, what is in the here and now…not a contrived one. What Americans need, here and now, is a more responsive government to address problems specific to the needs of its citizens. Hopefully, the nation heard the President and will return to its virtual senses and a common reality of what’s best for all of us. Not just a few of us. BlackCommentator.com Columnist, Dr. Anthony Asadullah Samad, is a national columnist, managing director of the Urban Issues Forum and author ofSaving The Race: Empowerment Through Wisdom. His Website isAnthonySamad.com. Twitter @dranthonysamad. Click here to contact Dr. Samad.

Applaud Tucson’s Unified School District! Now, Confiscate Shakespeare’s Plays!

Represent Our Resistance By Dr. Lenore J. Daniels, PhD BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board

In the aftermath of the suspension of the Tucson Unified School District’s Mexican American studies department, TUSD has confiscated and continues to confiscate MAS teaching materials. Besides artwork and posters etc, that includes books. This move came in response to an unconstitutional measure, HB 2281, which was specifically created to dismantle the highly successful MAS-TUSD department. -(“Arizona’s ‘banned’ Mexican American Books,” Guardian.co.uk.) The Tucson Unified School District (TUSD) should be applauded! The masterminds behind HB 2281 are really national heroes! TUSD took action toward ending the corruption of the national school curriculum by confiscating book that do not represent the values and traditions of this great country and even greater government. Citizens in this democracy must keep in mind that these confiscated books were written by and/or about Mexican Americans, and Mexican Americans are really not Americans! As of January 10, 2012, books were “boxed and carried off.” And rightly so! Consider some of the titles “not banned” but “merely confiscated,” (Guardian.co.uk, January 18, 2012). Critical Race Theory, by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic 500 Anos Del Pueblo Chicano / 500 Years of Chicano History: In Pictures, edited by Elizabeth Martinez Message to Aztlan, by Rodolfo Corky Gonzales Chicano! the History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement, by F Arturo Rosales Occupied America: A History of Chicanos, by Rodolfo Acuña Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by Paulo Freire Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years, by Bill Bigelow Now, what significance are these books to the understanding of U.S. history, political and domestic policies, social and cultural influences and experiences? I propose that school districts throughout the U.S. follow Tucson’s lead, but, in this year of 2012, the nation’s educational institutions should move swiftly, as swiftly as it moves to close borders, deport foreigners, passes bills to track, target, imprison and execute “terrorists,” to remove all reading materials that threaten the innocence of U.S. children and young adults: Let us confiscate Shakespeare! Start with the King, the great author of European letters because I think the brilliant minds behind the confiscation of Mexican American books would agree - the themes of William Shakespeare’s plays (let us not speak of his vile poetry) were not written with the best interests of American children in mind: These plays are littered with violence and undemocratic perspectives. And, of course, Shakespeare was a Brit! No more Shakespeare! No more of this Dane Hamlet talking of sitting on ladies laps and “country matters.” No more of his talk of suicide, “to be or not to be.” Let us not listen with him to the voice of “ghosts,” he claims is his father, the murdered King, and his insistence that this “ghost,” the father, urges him to kill the current King, Hamlet’s uncle, now wedded to Hamlet’s mother! Let us not have U.S. children and young adults witness Hamlet’s psychological torture of Ophelia, supposedly, his lover. No child in the U.S. should have to read how Europe treated its Jewish populations in what is now Italy. Or how revenge is a contract requiring a pound of flesh - actual human flesh! Children and young adults in this New World and in this greatly advanced nation should not be exposed to Shakespeare’s array of court jesters. We have no counterparts here! Shakespeare’s men dressed as women and women dressed as men may have contributed to the corruption of the young minds here and the stretching of their innocent imaginations. Curriculums must be mindful of the effects on innocents reading of a teen couple, defying parents, to openly love each other and to wed in secret, resulting in the suicide of both the young Romeo and Juliet. Children and young adults in the U.S. do not need an introduction into the scheming and conniving ways of someone like Iago. What is it that our children and young people are to learn from reading the words of a liar who hates his superior - a Moor! - so much that he plots to have Othello kill Desdemona, Othello’s white wife. Too sordid for American children! Reading of the honest Brutus and his gang plot the assassination of the Emperor, and the greed, lavish lifestyles, treachery, dishonesty, and murderous minds of Kings is to be avoided since, as we know, the American Colonists fought a revolution against the monarchy of England and forged a “democracy” here in theNew World. American children and young adults do not need to read of wars and enemies, land confiscations, brutal slaughters at home and abroad, imprisonment in dungeons, and executions, usually beheadings. Little Mexican, Black, Indigenous, and Asian students, in particular, do not need to know that their classmates of European descend had ancestors who were power-hungry and arrogant, narrow-mind and “tribal,” and who killed at the blink of an eye - and killed by the hundreds! This is the United States of America - the New World! In a country like the U.S., American values must be upheld! And although we all are not too clear on what those values are - we are certain they are not represented, (if I understand the TUSD correctly), in foreign history or in the behavior of foreigners. The Indigenous children learned long ago what the Mexican, Black, and Asian students in the U.S. understand for themselves now, of course. They have been so welcome here in the democratic U. S. of A.! The experiences of Mexican, Black, Indigenous, Asian, Muslim, Arab children here and globally can testify to the benevolence of the New Empire, that is, the United States! Just as the history of Mexican American struggle and resistance is, well - insignificant, Shakespeare’s historical and romance plays offer no relevance for young minds in the United States! BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has a Doctorate in Modern American Literature/Cultural Theory. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.