Politics

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Flora Crater

Flora Crater, a long time activist and friend has died at 94.  Her obituary in the Richmond Times-Dispatch began

Flora Marina Trimmer Crater was born in an era of male-only voting and racial segregation. Before her death Sunday at age 94, she was able to vote for a woman for president in a national primary and help elect the first black president.

She founded and led Crater’s Raiders, a group of us who worked for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment in Virginia in 1972.  I remember using my lunch hour to stand vigil around the perimeter of the Virginia Capitol grounds. 

Also in 1972, she and I were McGovern delegates to the Democratic National Convention.  I remember that many of the union men were supporting Humphrey and were disappointed that McGovern was nominated.  Despite, or maybe because of, that disappointment, many of them joined the women in the delegation in supporting the vice-presidential nomination of Frances “Sissy” Farenthold.  I remember one of them saying to me, “We are doing it for Flora.”

I haven’t seen her since I left Virginia fifteen years ago, but she was someone I looked up to and learned a great deal from Flora.  I also remember her sense of humor and her gentleness which covered an iron will to gain equal rights for women and for all people.

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Lessons from FDR

Tony Badger had an interesting article in the January 26 print edition of the Nation which I have just finished reading.  The history lesson and the review of the politics FDR had to deal with are instructive, but the lessons he draws for President Obama are to the point and worth noting.

First, in an economic emergency, however distasteful it may be, you have to bail out the bankers and corporations. Second, any economic recovery package has to be bold–to create jobs, you have to spend a lot. Third, infrastructure investment works–as the New Deal’s public works programs showed in highways, education, cheap electrical power and flood control. Fourth, while you do not have to postpone much-needed reforms, you don’t have to get all your reforms passed at once. Finally, you cannot expect a recovery program, no matter how well prepared, to sail through unchallenged. You have to be nimble enough to accept some of the things Congress will insist on that you may not like. But there may be new and unexpected crises that can, as in 1933, offer opportunities to a president willing to take them.

Badger is the author of the new book FDR: the first one hundred days which I have not read yet, but I believe I heard or read somewhere that Barack Obama was reading it.

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Republican Stimulus

I have Chris Matthew’s Hardball playing in the background.  He is interviewing two Republicans are still pushing business tax cuts and the same old Republican agenda.  One of them wanted to know what the money for the arts will do to create jobs. The answer is every musical or theatical production, every symphony orchestra, every movie employs people other than the artists.  Look at the jobs created- and the lasting contribution made –  by the art projects funded by FDR.  Arts money can also be used to maintain arts programs in the schools – which will employ teachers.  Jobs.

The whole “this is a Democrat bill” drives me nuts.  Didn’t the Republicans lose the election?  Luckily Paul Krugman had some advice in his column from January 26:

…So as a public service, let me try to debunk some of the major antistimulus arguments that have already surfaced. Any time you hear someone reciting one of these arguments, write him or her off as a dishonest flack.

First, there’s the bogus talking point that the Obama plan will cost $275,000 per job created. Why is it bogus? Because it involves taking the cost of a plan that will extend over several years, creating millions of jobs each year, and dividing it by the jobs created in just one of those years.

It’s as if an opponent of the school lunch program were to take an estimate of the cost of that program over the next five years, then divide it by the number of lunches provided in just one of those years, and assert that the program was hugely wasteful, because it cost $13 per lunch. (The actual cost of a free school lunch, by the way, is $2.57.)

The true cost per job of the Obama plan will probably be closer to $100,000 than $275,000 — and the net cost will be as little as $60,000 once you take into account the fact that a stronger economy means higher tax receipts.

Next, write off anyone who asserts that it’s always better to cut taxes than to increase government spending because taxpayers, not bureaucrats, are the best judges of how to spend their money.

Here’s how to think about this argument: it implies that we should shut down the air traffic control system. After all, that system is paid for with fees on air tickets — and surely it would be better to let the flying public keep its money rather than hand it over to government bureaucrats. If that would mean lots of midair collisions, hey, stuff happens.

Today Bob Herbert calls the Republican arguments “The Same Old Song“:

What’s up with the Republicans? Have they no sense that their policies have sent the country hurtling down the road to ruin? Are they so divorced from reality that in their delusionary state they honestly believe we need more of their tax cuts for the rich and their other forms of plutocratic irresponsibility, the very things that got us to this deplorable state?

The G.O.P.’s latest campaign is aimed at undermining President Obama’s effort to cope with the national economic emergency by attacking the spending in his stimulus package and repeating ad nauseam the Republican mantra for ever more tax cuts.

My favorite line of the Herbert column is

The truth, of course, is that the country is hemorrhaging jobs and Americans are heading to the poorhouse by the millions. The stock markets and the value of the family home have collapsed, and there is virtual across-the-board agreement that the country is caught up in the worst economic disaster since at least World War II.

The Republican answer to this turmoil?

Tax cuts.

They need to go into rehab.

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Where is the Center?

There has been a lot of chatter about Barack Obama “moving to the center” or “governing from the center”.   Victor Navasky wrote in a Comment  for the Nation reacting to all the pundits saying that Obama’s Cabinet appointments and Inaugural Address showed he was moving to the center:

First, as our friend and backer Paul Newman used to remind us, The Nation was valuable because it helps define where the center is. The center can shift. When Obama added to his ritualistic description of America as “a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus” a new category–“nonbelievers”–it was almost unbelievable, as he quickly helped redefine where the center was.

Second, based on what we know about Obama–his books, his initial intuitive stand against the war in Iraq, his Senate voting record, his campaign, his inaugural speech–I don’t believe it. At most, he seems to me a liberal wolf in centrist sheep’s clothing.

And finally, faced with the ever-more-dire economic crisis, his commitment to a Keynes-based economic stimulus and renewed regulatory rigor (see his inaugural reference to not letting the market “spin out of control”) suggests that, at a minimum, he flunked Centrism 101.

As Navasky (and Paul Newman) both know, the center moves.

Michael Tomasky writing in the Guardian (the whole piece is very interesting by the way) points out

Now we are in the age of Barack Obama. Now it’s conservatism that has broken down and contracted into a narrow ideology. And Obama’s project is nothing less than to revive this pre-1970s conception of liberalism as an ongoing civic project to which all contribute and from which all benefit. It was there in his inaugural speech when he spoke of “the price and the promise of citizenship”, and it’s present in his early proposals. The stimulus package that he began negotiating with congressional leaders last week is an audacious experiment along these lines. Let’s invest these billions together, he is saying, and in time the investments will bear fruit and benefit everyone.

I’m hoping that Navasky and Tomasky are right.  I’m hoping that just because John McCain is now whining about not liking the Recovery and Reinvestment bill, President Obama and the Congress will not cave.  When I heard McCain I started screaming at the radio, “But you lost!”

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Making Change

There is a new sheriff in town and his name is Barack Obama.  I think he made that clear yesterday when he told the Republican Congressional leaders (after listening to their laundry list of what was wrong with his Recovery Act proposal), “I won.”

So far President Obama seems to listen to lots of points of view and then make a decision.  I saw an interview with General Powell recently in which he described Obama’s leadership style:  Lots of internal discussion and disagreement.  Then Obama makes a decision and the drama is over.  At least this is what happened during the Transition and the campaign.  There is no reason not to think this will continue.  So “no drama Obama” seems to apply only to what we see in public and there are lots of dissenting voices before decisions are made.  There is nothing like former President Bush’s  (I love writing that!) way of decision making.  In one of his exit interview, Bush was asked if he called people like General Powell before he made a decision after 9/11 and he basically said, “no.  I knew what they thought.”  I can’t imagine this happening with President Obama.  A change.

People can quibble about whether he’s going far enough to end torture and certainly whether his immediate waiver of this lobbying executive order for a former Raytheon lobbyist was a good thing, but I say, so far so good.

I am on the side of those who would like to see prosecutions of those who ordered torture.  But I think (I hope) I see the tactic.  Don’t come out and say you are going to prosecute before Congressional investigations are completed and before there are reports about what Justice, Defense, the NSA and CIA find in internal memos.  Collect the evidence first.

David Sirota wrote

Cut through the meaningless platitudes describing our new president as a post-partisan, post-racial pragmatist, and you find an inspiring leader who organized us around optimism. Then consider that leader’s behavior since the election, and you run into that nagging speck of doubt. His less-than-inspiring Cabinet appointments, his support of Bush’s Wall Street bailout, his embrace of nonsensical corporate tax cuts – these moves raise questions about whether Obama is willing to differentiate between his two campaign themes: hope and change.

While both those things have lately been in short supply, the distance between them on policy is the gulf separating ambition and realization. Hope is a bill peppered with “may” – the word that merely asks banks or polluters to regulate themselves. Change is a statute teeming with “shall” – a term forcing its targets to comply. Hope is telegenic glamour, winning smiles, and poignant one-liners. Change is all the grinding work and uncomfortable confrontations that come with challenging power and enacting transformative laws.

The reason so many cried this week is because we can finally glimpse that change in the distance. And yet, those pangs of concern linger. They don’t undermine the euphoria or diminish Obama’s promise. But they do recognize that we worry about hope’s mirage – and pray there are no illusions this time.

Amen.

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Pete Seeger at the Lincoln Memorial

The concert at the Lincoln Memorial was a wonderful start to the festivities.  My favorites were Garth Brooks (who knew he could do gospel?) and Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen leading everyone in Woody Guthrie’s This Land is My Land . 

I grew up with Pete Seeger both with the Weavers and as a solo.  He used to come and perform at the annual Bucks County PA Peace Fair and I recall selling him Italian Ice at least once.  John Pareles wrote in his review of the concert in the New York Times

Its penultimate song had the 89-year-old folk singer Pete Seeger, who survived being blacklisted during the McCarthy era, leading a singalong on a full-length version of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” with one of his admirers, Mr. Springsteen, by his side.

And Joanna Weiss  in the Boston Globe

But the penultimate act seemed to suit the day best: Pete Seeger, 89, standing by Springsteen and the youth choir, feeding the crowd the lines to “This Land Is Your Land.” In his multicolored cap, gazing out on the scene, he wore an expression that veered toward glee.

But the most important piece was posted today in The Nation by Peter Rothberg.  Rothberg is promoting Seeger for a Nobel Peace prize for his decades of work.

Seeger has been an inimitable ambassador for peace, social justice and the best kind of patriotism over the course of a remarkable lifetime. As a prominent musician his songs have engaged people, particularly the youth, to question the value of war, to ban nuclear weapons, to work for international solidarity and against racism wherever it is practiced, and to assume ecological responsibility.

A particular hero to the civil rights movement on whose behalf he worked so tirelessly, Seeger made his first trip south at the invitation of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1956, and returned in ’65, again at King’s personal invitation, to join the march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. Amid the tension and heat, Seeger went from campfire to campfire when the march stopped for the night, raising people’s morale with rollicking sing-alongs of new freedom songs.

 Check out  nobelprize4pete.org and ask the American Friends Service Committee to nominate him.

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Marking the End of Bushisms

Bushisms are the one thing I will probably missed when George W. leaves on Tuesday.  Yes, it was embarassing to have a President who couldn’t really speak English, but they were also funny.   Maybe funny sad sometimes, but always worth a chuckle.  Doonesbury created whole Sunday comics of them framed and displayed as in a museum.  Calendars quoted them.  Bushisms became a cottage industry.  It was a way those of us on the left could use his own words to mock him when we seems powerless to change his policies.

Jacob Weisberg has now collected W’s Greatest Hits for Slate. Weisburg writes

People often assume that because I’ve spent the past nine years collecting Bushisms, I must despise George W. Bush. To the contrary, Bushisms fill me with affection for the man—and not just because of the income stream they’ve generated. I find the Bush who flails with words, unlike the Bush who flails with policy, to be an endearing character. Instead of a villain, he makes himself into an irresistible buffoon, like Mrs. Malaprop, Archie Bunker, or Homer Simpson. Bush treats words the way he treated recalcitrant European leaders: When they won’t do what he wants them to, he tries to bully them into submission. Through his willful, improvisational, and incompetent use of language, he tempers (very slightly) his willful, improvisational, and incompetent use of government. You can’t, in the end, despise someone who regrets that, because of the rising cost of malpractice insurance, “[t]oo many OB/GYNs aren’t able to practice their love with women all across the country.”

Weisberg’s favorite is “Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.” from August 5, 2004.  Mine is “And so, General, I want to thank you for your service. And I appreciate the fact that you really snatched defeat out of the jaws of those who are trying to defeat us in Iraq.”—meeting with Army Gen. Ray Odierno, Washington, D.C., March 3, 2008.

What ever your favorite Bushism is as Weisberg says, “Unfortunately, as we bid farewell to Bushisms, we must conclude that the joke was mainly on us.”

 

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Calvin Trillin Toasts Obama

NPR has started a series in which poets write an inaugural poem.  Here is Calvin Trillin’s:

Anticipating The Inauguration Of Barack Obama

Inauguration is the day
The nation’s hopes go on display —
When through one man we all convey
Our dream that things will go our way.
His résumé we can’t gainsay.
In politics, it’s clear, his play
Is worthy of the N. B. A.
He proved that in the recent fray,
Though he had help from Tina Fey.
And now this solemn matinee
Awards his country’s top bouquet.

First, Pastor Warren’s going to pray
For everyone who isn’t gay.
Obama then will stand and say,
“I take this oath that I’ll obey
The statutes of the U. S. A.”
In his address, he might portray
The dragons he intends to slay:
How Wall Street’s sky will turn from gray
To blue as blues are chased away,
How workers will collect good pay
For turning out a Chevrolet,
How in Iraq we’ll end our stay
With shortest possible delay,
How pay-to-play will be passé
So K Street suits will not hold sway.
Yes, how we’ll triumph, come what may:
And rise up like a good soufflé
‘Til life’s just like a caberet.

Obamacans will shout hooray
And toast their man with Chardonnay,
As commentators all make hay
Comparing him to JFK.
The Beltway types, those still blasé,
Might think that soon, with some dismay,
We’ll wonder if his feet are clay.
But that’s all for another day

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Recovery and Reinvestment

Dean K Baker has posted an interesting story on Alternet about Republican motivations for blocking Obama ‘s American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan.  Baker’s theory?  The Republican fear of 20 years out of power.  Baker argues that despite evidence that the New Deal helped millions Republicans now think no intervention would have been better policy.

At least some Republicans are starting to muster an anti-stimulus drive, claiming that President-elect Obama’s package will not help the economy. Their drive is centered on what they claim is a careful rereading of the history of the New Deal. According to their account, President Roosevelt’s policies actually lengthened the Great Depression.

In their story, we would have been better off if we just left the market to adjust by itself. New Deal programs that directly employed people, or in other ways supported living standards, created an uncertain investment climate. They claim that this uncertainty slowed the process of market adjustment that was necessary for returning to high levels of employment.

The Wagner Act, which created the legal framework for the union organizing drives of the era, stands out as being especially pernicious in their story. The Fair Labor Standards Act, which created the 40-hour workweek and established the first national minimum wage, also gets singled out for criticism. In this new reading of history, what most people consider the great successes of the New Deal simply worsened the Great Depression.

We are hearing Republicans (and some Blue Dog Democrats) worrying about the size of the deficit.  Even though Many economists, including Paul Krugman, argue that the proposed Recovery and Reinvestment dollars are still too little.  Krugman explains what he calls the output gap.

Bear in mind just how big the U.S. economy is. Given sufficient demand for its output, America would produce more than $30 trillion worth of goods and services over the next two years. But with both consumer spending and business investment plunging, a huge gap is opening up between what the American economy can produce and what it’s able to sell.

And the Obama plan is nowhere near big enough to fill this “output gap.”

….

To close a gap of more than $2 trillion — possibly a lot more, if the budget office projections turn out to be too optimistic — Mr. Obama offers a $775 billion plan. And that’s not enough.

Now, fiscal stimulus can sometimes have a “multiplier” effect: In addition to the direct effects of, say, investment in infrastructure on demand, there can be a further indirect effect as higher incomes lead to higher consumer spending. Standard estimates suggest that a dollar of public spending raises G.D.P. by around $1.50.

Both Baker and Krugman worry that we are not planning enough public spending.  Baker again

Roosevelt was too worried about the whining of the anti-stimulus crowd that he confronted. He remained concerned about balancing the budget when the proper goal of fiscal policy should have been large deficits to stimulate the economy. Roosevelt’s policies substantially reduced the unemployment rate from the 25 percent peak when he first took office, but they did not get the unemployment rate back into single digits.

It took the enormous public spending associated with World War II to fully lift the economy out of the depression. The lesson that economists take away from this experience is that we should be prepared to run very large deficits in order to give the economy a sufficient boost to generate self-sustaining growth.

The bottom line is that President Obama and the Democrats in Congress need to get over worrying about deficits and get on with the business of closing the output gap.  As Dean Baker explains, part of the Republican objection is that is the Democats are sucessful is turning around the economy, the Republicans could spent the next 20 years out of power.

However, from the standpoint of Republicans, the more ominous lesson of the New Deal policies is that it left the Democrats firmly in power for more than 20 years. The Republicans did not regain the White House until 1952, 20 years after President Roosevelt was first elected.

Imagine how terrifying the prospect of 20 years of Democratic presidencies must be for the current generation of Republican leaders. This would mean that they would not retake the White House until 2028, just 20 years before the Social Security trust fund is first projected to face a shortfall.

In 2028, Newt Gingrich will be 85 years old; Mitt Romney will be 81; Mike Huckabee will be 73 and Senator McCain will be 98. Even Sarah Palin will be a less than youthful 64. In short, if President-elect Obama is allowed to carry through with his stimulus package and the rest of his ambitious domestic agenda, most of current leadership of the Republican Party can expect to spend the rest of their political career in the political wilderness, far removed from the centers of power

Krugman’s bottom line

… is that the Obama plan is unlikely to close more than half of the looming output gap, and could easily end up doing less than a third of the job.

Krugman suggests that spending on items like health care can help if there are not enough “shovel ready” projects to spend on right away.  Is the current Obama plan really only the first installment?

Obama’s reaction to Krugman’s column was telling:  He’s probably going to end up meeting with Krugman and listen to his ideas.  What a refreshing change from George W.  who didn’t need to talk to anyone or to consult with others because he knew what they thought.  Obama said he had “no pride of authorship”, just didn’t want the debate to hold up action.

President Elect Obama, don’t worry about the deficit.  Get us out of this mess, close the output gap and over the next twenty years we will have another Bill Clinton come and reduce the deficit.  You don’t have to do it all – and you certainly don’t have to do it all right away.