Hank Kalet

More on the class war

It was Warren Buffet who said that America is involved in a class war, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

The numbers are staggering, as Robert Scheer points out today on Truthdig:

In one of the best studies of this growing gap in income, economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty found that during Clinton’s tenure in the White House the income of the top 1 percent increased by 10.1 percent per year, while that of the other 99 percent of Americans increased by only 2.4 percent a year. Thanks to President Clinton’s deregulation and the save-the-rich policies of George W. Bush, the situation deteriorated further from 2002 to 2006, a period in which the top 1 percent increased its income 11 percent annually while the rest of Americans had a truly paltry gain of 1 percent per year.

The upshot is that the top 1 percent of Americans control 40 percent of the wealth. But few are talking about it.

Instead, we have a debate over how best to cut programs for the middle class and the poor so that we can plug a hole in our budget and not whether to ask the rich to pay. From Scheer, again:

Instead of taxing the superrich on the bonuses dispensed by top corporations such as Exxon, Bank of America, General Electric, Chevron and Boeing, all of which managed to avoid paying any federal corporate taxes last year, the politicians of both parties in Congress are about to accede to the Republican demand that programs that help ordinary folks be cut to pay for the programs that bailed out the banks.

President Barack Obama is blaming political games for the budget stalemate, refusing to accept responsibility for his enabling of the so-called budget hawks. He should have been fighting hard for a real stimulus that could have jump-started the economy and not just a stop-gap designed to avert disaster. And rather than touting his accomplishments at a time when unemployment remains unacceptably high, he should have been pushing hard for aid to states to keep public workers employed while also empowering labor.

The Republicans make no bones about their priorities. They want to slash spending and gut what’s left of the social safety net. And they want to do this even as they find ways to give money to the people who already have it.

And they are likely to win, thanks to the timidity of the Democrats.

Despite the alarming projections of how the House Republican budget would harm the country, it’s the Democrats who have been on the defensive during the budget debate, principally because President Obama has declined to seriously engage in the discussions or outline an alternative narrative on the economy that is distinct from the GOP. Though they hold only one house of Congress, House Republicans act like they’re in control of the entire government, with little pushback from the White House or Senate Democrats. Both parties now endorse the idea that spending cuts are the best cure for our ailing economy, even though there is no evidence that is the case.

Obama has said that he was perceived as too much of a “tax and spend liberal Democrat” in the last election, so his administration has moved to the right as a result—despite the fact that poll after poll shows that the public believes the unemployment rate is a far more pressing problem than the deficit. “The White House, in particular, has effectively surrendered in the war of ideas,” New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote recently. “It no longer even tries to make the case against sharp spending cuts in the face of high unemployment.” Throughout this budget fight, we’ve been having the wrong economic debate, as my colleague Katrina vanden Heuvel noted this week. Both our political and media class are guilty of focusing obsessively on spending cuts while ignoring the public’s overriding priority: jobs.

But then, the Democrats long ago ceased to represent workers and the middle class. They are beholden to the same money men as the Republicans. The class war is over and the rich have won.

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

Obama and best of the worst

Barack Obama announced yesterday that he will seek re-election in 2012 and, like Ted Rall, I can’ for the life of me think of why I should care.

We are now nearly 27 months into his presidency and the great liberal hope has proven to be Clinton redux — a corporate stooge in thrall to the military-industrial complex.

Evidence:

A health-care law that forces people to give the health insurance companies money — a law, in fact, modeled on the flawed one put in place by former Gov. Mitt Romney (and perennial Republican presidential candidate) in Massachussetts.
A weak financial reform bill that has done little to prevent Wall Street speculators to get back to their old games.
An expanded war in Afghanistan that has been expanding into Pakistan, continued war in Iraq, military intervention (short of war) in Libya without Congressional approval.
Continuation of Bush-era policies on detention, Guantanamo, interrogation.
A half-measure stimulus and a cave-in to Republicans on the deficit.
Support for nuclear power and clean coal and a hands-off approach to Big Oil’s requests to expand domestic and deepwater drilling — even after the 2010 BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.
An array of broken promises on labor rights issues, tax policy (extending the Bush tax cuts even as he agreed to tackle the deficit).

And yet, Obama is likely to garner support from a good portion of the left because of the downward pressure our first-past-the-post puts on our electoral system. By all rights, the left should walk away from Obama; it’s the only thing we have left and the only way we will be able to gain any leverage in the policy arena.

But we won’t. The memory of eight years of Bush remains too strong, so the lesser-of-two-evil argument is going to come back, going to play a major role in the discussion on the left flank of the political discussion. Consider the alternative, the argument will go, and it will be effective — there is not a Republican in the race or on its periphery (i.e., Gov. Chris Christie) who warrants a shot at the Oval Office.

Progressives may not like the alternatives, may indeed opt for Obama over Michelle Bachmann, Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty, et al. But progressives should also make it clear that any support given to Obama comes with a price tag — moving progressive goals to the top of the agenda.

More importantly, we need to stop thinking of the electoral arena as the only outlet for political action. It cannot be about candidates and money, but about direct action and protest and the creation of a moral momentum that forces the larger political class to listen.

The history of our political movements makes it clear that it is our only hope. Direct action — sit-down strikes, general strikes, marches, boycotts — forced issues like civil and labor rights onto the table, pushing the politicians to act. Protests against Vietnam, including the flight to Canada by those evading the draft, forced politicians to find a way to end that nightmare.

We have hit the same point today.

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

When job growth is not job growth

Dean Baker explains what the national business press is unwilling to explain: Why Friday’s announcement that the U.S. economy created 216,000 jobs does not feel like the good news the media is making it out to be.

Those who know arithmetic were a bit more sceptical. If the economy sustained March’s rate of job growth, it will be more than seven years before we get back to normal rates of unemployment.

Furthermore, some of this growth likely reflected a bounceback from weaker growth the prior two months. The average rate of job growth over the last three months has been just 160,000. At that pace, we won’t get back to normal rates of unemployment until after 2022.

That’s a long time to make ordinary workers suffer because the folks who run the economy are not very good at their job.

In addition to the job growth numbers, the March data also showed that the unemployment rate slipped down by another 0.1 percentage point. It now stands at 8.8%, almost a full percentage point below its year ago level of 9.7%. This, too, was treated as cause for celebration. While that may sound like progress, a more careful look at the data makes this number less impressive. The percentage of the population that is employed has actually fallen by 0.1 percentage point over the last year.

In order to be counted as unemployed, you have to say that you are looking for work. The unemployment rate did not fall because the unemployed had found jobs; rather, the unemployment rate fell because people have given up looking for work. Only in Washington would this be hailed as good news.

Consider this evidence that the major media and the political classes live in a very different world than the rest of us.

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

Budgets and priorities: A GOP assault on the middle class (UPDATED)

And so you have it, a Republican budget plan that would roll back the clock to a time when society’s most vulnerable had nowhere to turn.

The budget plan would change the existing Medicaid program — which guarantees minimum health care for poor and disabled Americans — into loosely supported block grants to states. it would kill Medicare and shift its responsibilities onto the private health insurance industry, a prescription for higher costs and abuse.

At the same time, it lowers upper-end tax rates — money that will land in the hands of those who already have it. And it increases defense spending — though it does so by recategorizing spending to make it look like a decrease.

Budgets are blueprints of priorities. The winners and losers in budget battles are not the political parties — despite what the Washington chattering classes have to say — but the American people. The rich, the military sector, the corporate classes — they get a lot from the GOP budget proposal. The middle class and the poor — our benefits are going to be slashed. We lose badly.

***
Here is a statement from U.S. Rep. Rush Holt (D-12):

Budgets are moral documents. They reflect, in dollars and cents, our real priorities. Republican priorities are clear: abandoning the most vulnerable in our society by destroying Medicare and Medicaid in order to cut taxes for the wealthiest Americans. They would further shift the cost of government onto the middle class and force students, medical researchers, and small businesses to fight over the remaining scraps. These are not my priorities. My priorities are making smart investments that create jobs and strengthen American competitiveness and reducing the deficit by avoiding wasteful and unnecessary spending and costly tax expenditures.

If the new majority was looking for a formula that would bring back the ‘misery index’, they have succeeded.

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

Can the threats and debate the budget

Before anyone gets too hot under the collar, isn’t the threat of cuts being pushed by the Christie folks on a par with the same kinds of extortion pushed at other levels of government? Christie says the school money will have to come from somewhere — which is logical. The question is where and the Christie administration has its ideas — none of which are good or helpful for the state.

We need to discuss our options — a millionaires’ tax, further service cuts, a rewrite of the tax code, etc.

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.