Barack Obama – Hank Kalet

Roosevelt gave us the New Deal; Obama is poised to offer the Bad Deal

Interesting math from Sam Stein in a story on the latest offer from President Barack Obama in negotiations over the so-called fiscal cliff. The president now

proposes $800 billion in savings, including $290 billion in interest savings, $100 billion in defense cuts, and $130 billion in savings that would come from an adjustment to the inflation index for Social Security benefits. The administration insisted that there would be “protections for most-vulnerable populations” perhaps by indexing the changes so that they don’t affect those with low-income.

That leaves $280 billion in cuts unremarked upon.

The answer probably lies with the across-the-board cuts to social programs already included in the sequestration plan approved last year — cuts to heating assistance, food aid, Head Start, housing aid, etc., that will leave the nation’s most vulnerable in an even more precarious position.

Any deal that leaves these cuts on the table cannot be called a good deal, even if it ends up generating some revenue from higher taxes on the better off.

Forget for a second the humanitarian reasons for providing a sturdy safety net; there is an economic reason, as well, for protecting it. Social safety spending, which tends to rise during recessions, has a stimulative effect because it puts money in the pockets of the people who will spend it.

Rather than cutting these programs, we should be expanding them, while treating investment income like regular income, returning the inheritance tax to its earlier, higher rate, and letting the Bush tax cuts expire for those making more than $250,000 (I could live with $400,000)

Instead, however, we are focused on marginal tax rates and are ready to let European-style austerity wreak further havoc on our economy.

Rick Santorum quits a race he wasn’t going to win

Mitt Romney is the Republican nominee for president. He doesn’t have the delegates yet, but everyone knows he is the candidate and everyone has known he would be the candidate for months.

And yet, the GOP primary race continues, a freak show of remarkable proportions that has done little more than succeed in damaging what little credibility Romney had.

Today’s big news, that Rick Santorum has “suspended his campaign,” really isn’t news at all. Santorum was never going to be the nominee and never should have been taken serious as a candidate. Santorum is a right-wing nut, a religious conservative with 16th-century views on women, sex and patriotism. His success in the primary — carrying the most rabid and backward voters imaginable — only proved the existence of the dark heart of the GOP.

Santorum was only the latest in a long list of the kind of candidates that Hunter S. Thompson would have loved to write about. Herman Cain, Rick Perry, Michelle Bachmann, Newt Gingrich — all of them were varying shades of dangerous and weird.

Only Ron Paul, who had his own nasty baggage, offered any kind of alternative (criticism of crony capitalism and imperialism), and he was dismissed by the commentariat from the outset.

To capture the nomination, Romney — nominally a centrist/moderate in his past — has sprinted to the far corner of right-wing lunacy, with few among the mainstream press batting an eye. It was just something he needed to do, they say, and now he can tack back to the center and run the campaign he’s always wanted to run.

In this kind of atmosphere, one in which the strategy of the campaign is all that’s worth discussing, we are unlikely to get the kind of conversation about issues we need, or any honesty about the corporate-centered policies both parties push.

The difference between Romney and Barack Obama is one of degrees, not one of major substance. Both are beholden to the corporate order and tied to (different wings of) the foreign policy establishment. At least Obama doesn’t have to cowtow to the lunatic fringe. That, in and of itself, may be earn him a second term.

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.

A back-handed endorsement

Barack Obama has been a disappointment — but a fairly normative president. The problem with the presidency and American politics in general is that it rewards caution and moderation, especially when it is a supposedly liberal politician being overly cautious.

And yet, given the options, he probably should be re-elected. Robert Scheer offers a good explanation of why in what I will call the great back-handed compliment. A vote for Obama this time, unlike last time for many, is not so much to continue the status quo, but a preventative measure against elevating a confirmed liar and opportunist to the nation’s highest office.

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.

A mile wide and an inch deep: The #SOTU offers nothing new

I want to buy into the program being outlined tonight by President Barack Obama, at least a good chunk of it (not the gas drilling or the veiled allusion to merit pay for teachers), but I am troubled by the nagging reality of the calendar.

Obama was sworn in as president three years ago. He entered office with one of the largest Congressional and Senate majorities in recent memory. Yet, he was unable to parlay this basic reality into anything more than an industry-friendly health plan and a fiscal stimulus that was too small by at least half.

Apologists will blame the Republicans, will point to their obstructionism. Fair, perhaps, but only to a point. Obama failed to understand that he owned the bully pulpit and an early approval rating that gave him a boat load of political capital. Rather than get into the trenches and fight for an aggressive implementation of a Rooseveltian agenda, he bowed to the false god of compromise and bipartisanship.

In doing so, he allowed the political moment to pass. The economy continued to sputter (at best) and the right wing regained its confidence, with a grassroots Tea Party movement empowered by lobbying money supplying the ground troops. The recession no longer was about Wall Street and deregulation, but about over-regulation and high taxes.

Republicans won back the House and gained seats in the Senate, leaving a president whose viewed compromise as more important than any ideology, which is another way of saying that principles are fungible.

The Obama presidency looked in trouble until the reality of the Republican primary contestants (a collection of liars, cheaters, lunatics and morons) set in. Obama likely will win another term, but I hold no hope that he will do anything but fiddle around the edges of the status quo. He is not a transformational figure, but another in a long line of corporate-friendly Democrats who will win the support of liberals and progressives because the alternative is worse.

That explains the speech we are watching tonight, one in which he has cobbled together an agenda from a menu of offerings designed to appeal to as much of the political class as he can. It is an agenda that is a mile wide and an inch deep and will do nothing to alter the basic structural problems we face.

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 a story is not a story

A story in today’s New York Times is likely to raise eyebrows.

According to the paper,

The American Bar Association has secretly declared a significant number of President Obama’s potential judicial nominees “not qualified,” slowing White House efforts to fill vacant judgeships — and nearly all of the prospects given poor ratings were women or members of an ethnic minority group, according to interviews.

The rate, according to the story, is three times the previous two presidencies, which makes it seem as though we are looking at a run of unqualified judicial candidates being nominated.

A closer look, however, makes it clear that there is a lot more smoke than fire to this story:

the association’s judicial vetting committee has opposed 14 of the roughly 185 potential nominees the administration asked it to evaluate, according to a person familiar with the matter.

That’s 7.5 percent who were opposed by the ABA — or, to put it another way, 92.5 percent approved.

The administration points to a shift in philosophy — the push to appoint more judges with varied backgrounds, including those who have not worked as courtroom lawyers. This could be at odds with the ABA’s apparent preference for courtroom litigators and explain the higher number of rejections.

In any case, it seems like a non-issue, though I have a sneaky feeling that we’ll be hearing from conservatives on this one claiming that Obama is damaging the federal bench with unqualified judges. These, of course, will be the same conservatives who applauded when George W. Bush opted to stop sending nominees to the ABA for review because he felt the organization was ideologically biased.

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.