The Republic of T.

“Which side are you on?” That question, posed by Florence Reece in a pro-union song she wrote in 1931, echoes across the country today, in the form of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and demonstrations like Take Back the Capital this week. Millions of Americans caught in the drip of an economic crisis caused by Wall Street’s actions, who have waited years for relief as they’ve struggled with unemployment, foreclosures, and financial devastation are speaking with one voice, demanding of our elected leaders an answer to that most relevant question: “Which side are you on?”

Yesterday, Senate Republicans answered that question once again. They stand with Wall Street. They stand with the one percent.

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It seems ages ago (Doesn’t it?) that progressives were pushing hard to get Elizabeth Warren appointed to head her brainchild, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. We know how that worked out. Despite our best efforts, Warren didn’t get the appointment and moved on to become Senate candidate Warren, challenging Scott Walker for his Senate seat.

When it became clear that Senate Republicans would block Warren’s appointment, no matter what she or anyone else said or did, President Obama appointed Richard Cordray. The response from progressives was mixed. Many of us were, understandably disappointed that Warren didn’t get the appointment. Some viewed it as a betrayal. Some viewed it as a chance to for the CFPB to fulfill its vitally important mission.

Well, now Senate Republicans are blocking Cordray’s appointment. But unlike Warren’s appointment, this time its not about Cordray.

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In the past year, I’ve written so much about Ireland and its economy (here, here, here, here, and here) that I’m in the habit of keeping an eye out for news about Ireland, like a recent émigré looking for news of home. The thing is, I’m not Irish. (As far as I know, I have no Irish blood. Scottish, yes. Irish, not so far, but its a possibility.) I’ve never even been to Ireland (though I’d love to visit, someday.

I keep an eye on news about Ireland’s economy, because it’s regularly held up as an example we should follow here. At least in the headlines. Read a bit deeper, and it’s a different story. Take, for example, a recent New York Times article about Ireland and austerity.

In my browser, the header for the NYT article blares, “Ireland’s Austerity Hailed As Example of Financial Survival.” The headline tells a somewhat different story: “In Ireland, Austerity Is Praised but Painful.” Deeper into the article lies the truth: Ireland’s austerity is praised, painful, and not working.

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Elizabeth Warren really hit a nerve among conservatives with her winning message about the the social contract and America’s economy. What I didn’t know is that she did it with an assist from the right’s favorite philosopher on economic policy. (more…)

I didn’t think it was possible, but I found something more pathetic than John Boehner scrambling for GOP support for his debt limit bill, only to end up postponing the vote indefinitely. More pathetic even than Boehner telling is caucus to “get their asses in line” and vote for his bill, only to tell his caucus the next day to “get their asses in line” for a big kiss — if it’ll get them to vote for his bill.

What could be more pathetic? They may have brought Boehner to his knees, but the tea partiers literally don’t know what they’re doing in the legislative process.

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It’s Walmart’s world, and the rest of us are just living in it. That seems to be the take away from the Supreme Court’s ruling in Duke v. Walmart. The court ruled on a narrow aspect of the case, but the > decision has broad and foreboding implications for workers, women, minorities, and the course of progressive change going forward.

In March, when I first wrote about this case I began with a warning: “If you think conservatism’s war on America’s working- and middle-classes is only happening in Wisconsin and a few other states, you’re wrong. If you think that it’s only a war against public employees, you’re more wrong than you know.” I wrote that the court could possibly strip from private sector employees their last effective tool for seeking justice in the workplace.

Having read the news of the court’s decision in Walmart’s favor, I fear I was more right than I expected.

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Budget-cutting can be a bloody business, depending upon where and how deeply one cuts. It can be a deadly business too. Not for the budget-cutters, though. That’s especially true for Medicaid. To understand that, you need look no further than Arizona.

It was just earlier this year that Arizona was grabbed the spotlight as an example of just how deep GOP lawmakers were willing to cut. Rania Khalek recounts Arizona’s recent history in an Alternet post that reads like a budget cutters’ body count.

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“To whom much is given, much is required.” As he stood with the Progressive Congressional Congress to present the People’s Budget yesterday, Democratic Minority Whip Hank Johnson echoed the words of John F. Kennedy as he compared the caucus’s budget to Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget. Kennedy borrowed those words from the Bible, Luke 12:48: “For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required. The People’s Budget stands in stark contrast to conservative budget proposals that turn Kennedy/Luke quote on its head: “To whom much is given, not much is required.

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As a progressive, sometimes I almost feel that I should say "Thank you" to Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. Not for what he’s trying to do to Wisconsin, but for energizing the progressive movement, and motivating the Democrat’s base in a way that many of us have been trying to do or waiting for Democrats to do.

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A funny thing on the way to state budget solvency in Texas and Mississippi, which are among the reddest of the red states. You can’t get much more conservative than Texas’ and Mississippi’s governors, Rick Perry and Haley Barbour. The same goes for their budget solutions, which are firmly based in conservative budget orthodoxy: tax cuts and spending cuts will cure all budget ills.

So, why are Texas and Mississippi having serious budget problems? And why are the state’s governors breaking promises about taxes and spending?

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If, in the future, Republicans ever again ask “Where are the jobs?” it will be because they’ve forgotten where they buried the ones they killed. For now, though, it’s clear they remember all too well. Like a serial killer returning to a favorite dump site to reminisce or further ravage a corpse, Republicans are returning to the scene of the crime for a bit of fun with the still-fresh remains of 240,000 jobs the GOP killed off last month.

They’re coming back for more.

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President Obama is right. The Democrats got a “shellacking” in the midterm election. But not from the people who voted. And in a sense, the pundits and prognosticators are maybe half right. The president and his party were sent a message in this election. But not from the people who voted. Want to know who administered this midterm “shellacking” and delivered the message of the midterm elections of 2010? Want to know what how to avoid another “shellacking” in 2012?

Do the math.

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It Won’t Work

Not to pick on Kathleen Parker, but the “narrative” she suggested the Democrats take from midterm elections — “You can’t sell people what they don’t want” — is more likely to end up being the narrative the Republicans take from 2012 — if the president and the Democrats do what they need to do. Karl Rove was half-right when he said voters didn’t toss out the Democrats because are “enraptured with the GOP.” People are angry sure, but the numbers tell a different story.

People are angry not at what the Democrats did after 2008, but what they didn’t do. They didn’t “buy” what the GOP was selling. Like a shopper who ordered one thing and got another, American voters ordered transformative change in 2008 but got the same old transactional politics instead. The midterms of 2010 is their letter or complaint.

Here at Campaign for America’s Future, we just released a voter survey that shows voter fears about the economy and anger at government failure to help middle- working-class families even as Wall Street got bailed out.

Findings include:

• Compared to a candidate who attacked Democrats for the economic stimulus and health care reform, 57 percent of voters said they were much or somewhat more likely to support a candidate with a “made-in-America” campaign message that points out that Republicans have “pledged to support free trade deals and protect tax breaks for companies that send American jobs to India and China.”
• Eighty-nine percent of those surveyed agreed with the statement that “America is falling behind” in the global economy and that “we need a clear strategy to make things in America, make our economy competitive, and revive America’s middle class.”
• Sixty-nine percent said that “politicians should keep their hands off Social Security and Medicare” as they attempt to address the national deficit.
• A majority opposed the Republican plan to cut $100 billion from domestic spending programs while extending the Bush tax cuts to those earning more than $250,000, while 51 percent said they agreed that those top-end tax cuts should expire and with proposals offered by Democrats to reduce the deficit over time.
• Significant majorities in the poll supported new investments in infrastructure through a national infrastructure bank, a five-year strategy for reviving manufacturing in America

Why stop at one poll?

The GOP is not popular with Americans, nor is its agenda. Poll after poll leading up to the election bear this out. Their approval/favorability ratings were low going into the election, lower than the Democrats in many cases.

This is in the context of low approval ratings for Congress overall. But, as I said in the previous post, The Democrats’ problem is failing to deliver on the agenda Americans voted for in 2008. The Republicans problem is an agenda that remains toxic to most Americans.

Americans offer tepid support for much of the Republican Party’s domestic agenda, including repealing the new healthcare law and extending tax cuts for the wealthy, according to the latest Society for Human Resource Management/National Journal Congressional Connection Poll, conducted with the Pew Research Center.

The results suggest Republicans could struggle to pass legislation advancing many of the smaller-government themes that have dominated their campaigns in the midterm elections, even if the party wins control of one or both houses of Congress in November.

In particular, the party appears to risk a backlash from senior citizens, a critical voting bloc that harbors deep skepticism about tinkering with entitlement programs.

The survey is the most comprehensive polling look so far at the major elements of the agenda that key Republicans have been discussing in the weeks leading up to the election.

Not all the news was good for Democrats…

…Still, the poll offered little to suggest that the surge in voter support for Republican candidates, whom analysts project to win major gains this fall, carries over to support for policies championed this fall by Republican leaders in Washington and on the campaign trail.

Kos posted a handy breakdown when the poll came out.

• 29% of Americans support extending all of the Bush tax cuts.
• 32% support repealing the newly passed health care law.
• 33% support replacing Medicare with vouchers.
• 58% support creating Social Security private accounts.
• 46% support amending the Constitution to deny citizenship to children of illegal immigrants (49 are opposed).
• Fewer than half of Republican respondents favored extending all the Bush tax cuts or replacing Medicare benefits with vouchers.
• Poll respondents continue to disapprove of President Obama’s signature healthcare legislation, 45% to 38%.
• Three-quarters said they could not name the leader of the Republican Party, or that the party does not have a leader.

What do Americans want? Here’s a hint, it’s not what the Republicans campaigned on.

• A September AP poll said that Americans who wish health care reform went further outnumber opponents of health care reform by 2-to-1.
• An October poll by the Washington Post, the Kaiser Family Foundation, and Harvard university found that six in ten Americans say they want their representatives to fight for more government spending in their districts, to spur job growth.
• That’s compared to 39% who said they want cuts even if it means fewer local jobs. (That’s a flip from 1994, by the way, when 53% wanted their Reps. to fight for cuts, while 42% were on the other side.)
• In the same poll, 50% supported more government spending to boost the economy, while 46% prioritized deficit reduction.
• Not only did voters defeat major anti-tax measures in several states, but an AP poll less than 50 days before the election showed that 54% of Americans favored raising taxes on the highest earners, compare to 44% opposed.
• A Stanford University poll showed that 86% of Americans want government to limit the amount of air pollution that businesses emit.
• And 76% favored government regulating greenhouse gasses in particular.
• Another poll, conducted by Knowledge Networks and designed by Yale researches showed that 77% believe that global warming should be a priority for the president and Congress.
• And 94% believe that developing sources of clean energy should be a priority for the president and Congress.
• Meanwhile, 77% support regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant.

And that’s an overview, because a detailed analysis is more than I have space to do here.

Not of the above adds up to what the GOP was “selling” in this election. But it’s what more Americans “bought” in 2008 than voted in the midterm elections and any number of special elections since.

Parker follows the example of other conservatives who, after every election election since November 2008 have rushed to declare that “the people have spoken.” When voters in Massachusetts, Virginia, and New Jersey elected Republicans, they somehow “spoke” louder than those Americans who spoke in 2008. When 45 million fewer vote in 2010 than voted in 2008, “the people have spoken.”

The people spoke in 2008, and have been speaking since then. It’s just that neither party has listened.

The people spoke in 2008, upwards of 130 million of them, compared to 82.5 million in 2010. The numbers above, all from polls taken in the last half of this year, reflect what they voted for then and have wanted since.

From Democrats they got health care reform with no public option; and no fight to defend it; financial reform that left “Too Big To Fail” standing; a stimulus that was too small for the jobs crisis the country faces; a foreclosure prevention program that, in order to avoid helping the “wrong people,” helped almost no one; and no climate/energy legislation, given up without much of a fight.

From the GOP they got an agenda written by and for corporate interests.

The GOP is in an unenviable position. It is constitutionally incapable of delivering what Americans truly want. Meanwhile, the party must content with an extreme right that wants what Republicans cannot deliver without angering a great many Americans.

It won’t work.

The Democrats have a chance to come back if they want it. But they need a plan to finish what the started, and deliver what Americans said they wanted in 2008 and are still waiting for.

Then they have to convince us that they mean it.

It Hasn’t Worked

Karl Rove actually gets it. Sort of. He at least understands that voters didn’t toss out the Democrats because they are “enraptured with the GOP,” when he tells Republicans that it’s “time to deliver.” It just too bad for the GOP — and, now, the rest of the country — that they won’t anything Americans haven’t already sent back to the kitchen.

If what we heard and saw from them leading up to the election is any indication, the GOP doesn’t have any new ideas. Their platform recycles the same old conservative policy that failed before, and got us into a mess we’ll be trying to get out of for a while.

Late into the Bush administration, it became something of a joke that the president’s answer to everything was “Tax cut!” It was like he had a bad case of “Tax Cut Tourette’s Syndrome.” If so, today’s GOP has it just as bad. Tax cuts are their answer to everything, too. And we know how well that worked last time.

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First, let’s just face it. For the next couple of years, at least, this is the end of any progress on jobs or the economy. Whatever legitimate gripes progressives had with the outgoing Democratic Congress, the got a lot done. More, in fact, than most others. Ezra Klein called it a “Do-Something Congress.”

That this has been the most “do-something” Congress we’ve seen in 40 years hasn’t made much of an impression on the public. Multiple polls have found that only a minority of voters know that the 111th Congress got more done than most congresses. That’s true even among Democrats. Nor has their productivity made the 111th Congress popular. But if they failed as politicians, they succeeded as legislators. And legislating is, at least in theory, what they came to Washington toz do.

Interestingly enough, the Washington Post dubbed the 110th Congress a “Do-Something Congress”, when the Democrats took over in 2007, in hopes it would get more done than the outgoing Congress.

WHEN DEMOCRATS take over the House next year, the regular workweek will stretch to a backbreaking five days — up from the now-customary Tuesday-through-Thursday arrangement. Members of the House and Senate — no doubt reeling from the two weeks they’ve worked since the election — will have a mere four weeks off after they leave town Friday. Hard to believe, but the new leadership actually expects them to come to work on Jan. 4 rather than enjoy the usual elongated holiday break as they wait around for the president to deliver his State of the Union address in late January. In the Senate, the weeklong March break is being eliminated and the two-week April vacation cut in half.

…It would be quite a change. The 109th Congress will have been in session for a grand total of 103 days this year, which, as Lyndsey Layton pointed out in yesterday’s Post, is seven days fewer than the “Do-Nothing Congress” of 1948. An ordinary full-time worker with a generous four weeks of vacation would have clocked 240 days of work during that same period.

With the GOP taking over the House, the likelihood is that we’re faced with another “Do-Nothing” Congress, at least in term of creating jobs, fixing the economy, etc. As Bill pointed out before election day, the country is about to be saddled with a Congress that not only doesn’t work, but one determined not to let the President work either.

That’s not just because of gridlock, though there will be gridlock. It’s because conservative philosophy basically holds that a “Do-Nothing Congress” is exactly as it should be. And that’s exactly the GOP’s victory may be a Pyrrhic victory. Hemmed in by by a base that wants one thing, major (though anonymous) donors that want another, and an American voters angry that not enough been done to ease their economic pain — and who want more done — Republicans won’t be able to make it work without abandoning their base, their donors, the basic tenets of conservatism, or Americans demanding solutions the GOP just doesn’t have.

It won’t work. That’s what we face for the next two years. The best chance Democrats have for 2012 is to give voters a clear choice that does work, by offering solutions founded in progressive values, making the case for them, and fighting for them.

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This is not your country. Nor is it mine. That we were born here, along with our forebears hardly matters. This has been the message of the Tea Party since its incorporation — and of conservatism itself for more than a generation — to anyone who doesn’t fit their demographic, in terms of race, religion, politics, etc.

It is most often expressed by the Tea Party’s declared desire to “Take our country back.” This is not your country. Nor is it mine. It’s theirs, and they’re “taking it back.” This raises a few very important questions: “Who are they taking it from?”, “Who are they taking it for?”, and “How do they plan to take it?”

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Here’s another reason to vote in the mid-term elections this November: Conservatives think you need a pay cut. As I’ve said once or twice before, conservatives’ bottom line message is simple: America has economic problems because too many people have had it good for too long; and when they’re worse off again, the nation and its economy will be better off. The people they think had it too good for too long are you and me, and almost anyone who punches a clock to pull a paycheck.

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It’s almost a shame that Americans are paying very little attention to the GOP’s "Pledge To America." But maybe that’s because most of it has nothing to do with them. What is not mentioned in the document makes it clear that it doesn’t speak to the urgent  challenges Americans are facing. It doesn’t "pledge" to address the mass suffering inflicted on millions of America by the current crisis, or what failing to do so will mean for generations of Americans, because it’s not a pledge to most Americans. It’s a pledge to 1 percent (or even less) of America.

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Believe it or not, sometimes I censor myself. I write nearly complete blog posts and then decide for one reason or another not to publish them. Sometimes I censor them because even I’m convinced that I might have gone a little overboard. But yesterday, I read about something I wanted to write a post about, only to realize that I already had written a post about it — about a month before it happened.

Back in August, I wrote this in response to a post by Glenn Greenwald, about trend of cities and counties unpaving roads, turning out streetlights, stopping public bus service, shortening the school year, and even talking about eliminating the 12^th grade.

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A dear departed friend of mine, Alex, was know for saying “We all have choices.” It was usually in the form of advice and/or a warning to a friend who was about to make disastrous choice, with serious implications for his/her future. The not-so-thinly veiled implication was that our choices have consequences, and that we consider our choices carefully to avoid the worst consequences.

Sometimes, if someone particularly daft still wasn’t getting the message, Alex would add a note of severity by saying, “But sometimes those choices get taken away.” I thought about Alex’s warning today at the America’s Fiscal Choices conference. Well into a economic crisis, America still has fiscal choices, but if we don’t make the right choices — and make them soon — those choices will almost certainly be taken away.

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