Sacrificial lambs

The Knicks made what I think were a pair of good trades last week, unloading salary (Zach Randolph and Jamaal Crawford) for shorter term salary(Al Harrington, Cuttino Mobely and Tim Thomas). But that means that a team with limited prospects — figure 30-35 wins — will probably struggled to get to 30.

There are going to be a lot of long nights like tonight, when inconsistent shooting meshes with pourous defense to create a blowout. The Pistons, while not the team they were a few years ago, remain one of the better clubs in the league and continue to play solid D.

There are going to be a lot of losses over the next two years as the team tries to put itself in position to go after two members of what looks like the greatest free-agent class in league history.

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Another centrist joins Obama’s team

Another paragon of the system joins the Obama economic team — welcome Paul Volcker, as chairman of the new Economic Recovery Advisory Board. Obama says the new advisory board

will be responsible for bringing fresh thinking and “vigorous oversight” to the administration’s efforts to jumpstart and reshape the nation’s economy.

“The reality is that sometimes policymaking in Washington can become too insular,” Obama said. “The walls of the echo chamber can sometimes keep out fresh voices and new ways of thinking–and those who serve in Washington don’t always have a ground-level sense of which programs and policies are working for people, and which aren’t.”

His argument sounds good, but why not diversify these appointments — bring in some labor movement folks, or those who work on antipoverty efforts rather than the bureaucrats and Wall Street-types he’s tapped so far? It’s a good question that Obama has yet to answer.

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To the rescue

Sometimes, you just have to point out the positive. From The Star-Ledger:

On Monday, Elijah’s Promise soup kitchen announced it would have to stop serving lunch on Tuesdays because, with donations down and demand on the rise, the agency could no longer afford to meet the demand.

But today, after an influx of donations totaling $7,000, the New Brunswick charity said it will be able to restore that weekly meal, at least through January.

And yet, that the soup kitchen needed the sudden deluge of money, that it is seeing a rise in demand at a time when fewer people can donate and it takes an emergency to change the dynamic…. But let’s focus on the positive for a moment.

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Is Obama tacking right?

I sent my column off to The Progressive Populist last night. Its focus: Obama’s economic team and what it means for his governing philosophy. Does his appointment of center-right economic advisors like Lawrence Summers mean he will govern from the center-right on economic issues? I don’t think so, but there is a need for progressives to keep the pressure on.

That said, I just read this post on Open Left, which makes some of the same points. The poster, Paul Rosenberg, correctly points out that, without progressives at the policy table, “the idea of creating equity among the beneficiaries of large-scale investments will not even be raised in a rigorous fashion.”

This is one very concrete reason why it matters whether or not you have progressives in the top ranks of Obama advisors. There are very real, very pragmatic consequences to excluding people on the basis of “ideology.” Without such advocates for the economic interests of the broad mass of people, the vast majority of the benefits flowing from Obama’s substantial infrastructure initiatives may be expected to flow to the already wealthy, much the same way that Bush’s tax cuts primarily benefited that same group.

The point, as he says, is not to table infrastructure projects, but to design them in such a way as to share the benefits and the costs.

Of course, the infrastructure will be beneficial in and of itself. But if tens of millions of people will not only pay for it with their taxes, and then pay for it again with higher rents, or costlier mortgages, while a relative handful of wealthy real estate investors, land speculators and the like pocket literally billions of dollars, then it should not be hard to see how this doesn’t exactly qualify as government for the people, of the people and by the people.

Matt Rothschild, editor of The Progressive (and editor of my work with the Progressive Media Project), adds another name to the economic mix that progressives should be wary about: Peter Orszag, who was named as his new director of the Office of Management and Budget. The reason for concern is that Orszag has bought into the notion that Social Security is in trouble. And while he does not agree with conservative calls for privatization, he has called for “a reduction in benefits, which would apply to all workers age 59 and younger.”

Orszag and Diamond say that there is no free lunch in making sure Social Security remains solvent. So they propose cutting benefits and raising Social Security taxes.

But cutting benefits is unnecessary. The system is not in great peril and may only need minor adjustments to continue providing for American retirees well into the future. Among the tweaks, we could lift the cap on paying into the system, making the tax fairer (the cap makes the Social Security tax regressive, with lower-income wager-earners paying a greater percentage of their salary into Social Security than higher-income wage-earners) and generating more revenue.

In the end, we need to keep Obama honest, so to speak, and remind him that he won because he generated a lot of effort and interest from the young and the liberal wing of the party.

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