6 Responses to Sanders Skeptics

From Professor, economist, writer, political commentator Robert Reich.

He's for you, folks. He's for you and me.

#FeeltheBern

On the Death of the Republican Party (Guest Post)

From Professor/economist/commentator/writer Robert Reich and his Facebook page today:

I’m writing to you today to announce the death of the Republican Party. It is no longer a living, vital, animate organization. It has been replaced by warring tribes of rightwing zealots – evangelicals opposed to abortion, gay marriage, and science; libertarians opposed to any government constraint on private behavior; market fundamentalists convinced the “free market” can do no wrong; corporate and Wall Street titans seeking bailouts, corporate welfare, tax cuts, and deregulation; right-wing billionaires wanting more of the nation’s wealth than they own already; and white working-class Trumpoids who love Donald and hate Muslims, blacks, and Mexicans.

Each tribe has its own organization, its own sources of campaign funding, its own ideology, and its own candidates. What’s left is a lifeless shell called the Republican Party, but the Grand Old Party inside the shell is no more.

I, for one, regrets its passing. Our nation needs political parties to connect up different groups of Americans and to sift through prospective candidates. Without a Republican Party, there’s nothing standing between us and a bunch of liars, bigots, egomaniacs, and creeps who decide on their own to seek the Republican nomination president.

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What I resent most about the groups Professor Reich mentions above are the "...right-wing billionaires wanting more of the nation’s wealth than they own already..."    

They're the worst.  As I've written before, on people like the Koch brothers:  born millionaires, now billionaires.      And they want more.

What concerns me most, as we see the Republican Party self-destruct before our very eyes, is the political and power vacuum it will surely create.

We wouldn't want what comes after to be worse than the mess the Republican Party is and has been since around the end of our Civil War.

Quote of the day -- on the job creators

The real job creators are not CEOs or corporations or even entrepreneurs. The job creators are the middle class and the poor, whose purchases cause businesses to expand. If the middle and poor don't have enough purchasing power, businesses won't hire. Which explains why America's job picture continues to be so bad, with the lowest share of the working-age population now employed than in over three decades. Almost nothing has been trickling down to the middle class and poor. 

We don't need tax cuts for the wealthy or for corporations. We need a higher minimum wage, an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit, and stronger unions.

--Robert Reich,  American political economist, professor, author, and political commentator

On that deficit problem those Republicans are fighting?

Here's your deficit spending for you that the Republicans say they're fighting in Washington:

Don’t be fooled. This war was never over the federal budget deficit.

In fact, federal deficits are dropping as a percent of the total economy. For the fiscal year ending in September 2009, the deficit was 10.1 percent of the gross domestic product, the value of all goods and services produced in America. In 2010, it was 9 percent. In 2011, 8.7 percent. In the 2012 fiscal year, it was down to 7 percent.

The deficit ballooned in 2009 because of the Great Recession. It knocked so many people out of work that tax revenues dropped to the lowest share of the economy in over sixty years. (The Bush tax cuts on the rich also reduced revenues.) The recession also boosted government spending on a stimulus program and on safety nets like unemployment insurance and food stamps.

But as the nation slowly emerges from recession, more people are employed — generating more tax revenues, and requiring less spending on safety nets and stimulus. That’s why the deficit is shrinking.

Yes, deficits are projected to rise again in coming years as a percent of GDP. But that’s mainly due to the rising costs of health care, along with aging baby boomers who are expected to need more medical treatment.

Health care already consumes 18 percent of the total economy and almost a quarter of the federal budget (mostly in Medicare and Medicaid).

So if the ongoing war between Republicans and Democrats were really over those future budget deficits, you might expect Republicans and Democrats to be focusing on ways to hold down future healthcare costs.

They might be debating how to make the cost controls in the Affordable Care Act more effective, for example, or the merits of moving to a more efficient single-payer system, as every other advanced country has done.

But they’re not debating this, because the federal deficit is not what this war is about. It’s about the size of government. Tea-Party Republicans (and other congressional Republicans worried about a Tea-Party challenge in their next primary) want the government to be much smaller.

“My goal,” says conservative guru Grover Norquist, “is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”

What’s behind this zeal to shrink government? It’s not that the U.S. government has suddenly become larger. In fact, non-military government spending relative to the size of the U.S. economy remains the smallest of any other rich nation.
Apart from the military, Medicare and Social Security account for almost everything else the federal government does – and these programs continue to be hugely popular, as Republicans learn every time they threaten them.

The animus toward government has more to do with the growing frustrations of many Americans that they’re not getting ahead no matter how hard they work. Government is an easy scapegoat, utilized by much of corporate America to convince average Americans to cut taxes, spending, and regulations.

The median wage continues to drop, adjusted for inflation, even though the economy is growing. And the share of the economy going to wages rather than to profits is the smallest on record.

Increasingly it’s looked like the game is rigged, especially when people see government bailing out Wall Street (the Tea Party movement grew out of the bailout, as did the Occupiers), and handing out corporate welfare to big agriculture, big pharma, oil companies, and insurance companies.

The outrage grows when average working people are told – wrongly — that a growing portion of Americans don’t pay taxes and live off government handouts.

The battle over the fiscal cliff is nearly over, but the trench warfare will continue.

--Robert Reich, American political economist, professor, author, and political commentator.

Oh, and then there's this:  The Biden-McConnell Tax Deal Would Save Less

The tax deal negotiated between Vice President Joe Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and approved by the Senate early on January 1 would save less than half as much revenue as President’s Obama’s original proposal.

And if they really WERE concerned about all that pesky deficit spending, would this be true?

Eight Corporate Subsidies in the Fiscal Cliff Bill, From Goldman Sachs to Disney to NASCAR

Nice, huh?

All these, above, seem to make clear that in actuality, the Republicans aren't all about that pesky deficit after all. They're all for themselves and they simply want to stop this president and the other political party.

It's sick.
Links: Michael Hudson: America’s Deceptive 2012 Fiscal Cliff, Part II – The Financial War Against the Economy at Large
The "Fiscal Cliff" Hoax

Robert Reich - Wikipedia

Robert Reich

Robert Reich | Facebook

Notes and quotes on this presidential election

Some quotes from NPR yesterday, from a conversation of reporter Robert Siegel with E.J. Dionne, journalist and political commentator, and conservative commentator, journalist and writer--also Republican--David Brooks:

First, David Brooks on Mitt Romney: "His campaign is now in a sort of a state of crisis, I would say. The Republican elites are in somewhat panic.

You're seeing - the whole electoral map has sort of shifted. Some polls don't show it. The Gallup poll, to be fair, shows the race still tied, but basically, if you look at the whole electoral map, you have Obama up by five points in the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, maybe five in a bunch of others, eight in some others. And then you're beginning to see the states, the key states - Ohio, significant Obama leads, all the swing states, with the possible exception North Carolina, all shifting Democratic.

And so, I don't know how bad it's hurt him, but the electoral map is shifting in the Democratic direction."

More from Mr. Brooks: "I think it's mostly Romney, frankly. I think the country would like to vote against President Obama if they had a plausible alternative. But Romney is the only candidate in modern political history where his unfavorables are higher than his favorables. John McCain, Al Gore, people who lost, had double-digit advantage in favorable.

So people just don't like Romney. And the core problem is he's insincere. It's an insincere campaign. He's a non-ideological person in an ideological age and he's pretending to be something he's not."

Link to original interview: http://www.npr.org/2012/09/21/161581380/week-in-politics-the-47-percent-senate-races

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Brooks_(journalist)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._J._Dionne

Quote of the day

"Cynicism is the greatest enemy of reform." --Robert Reich, American political economist, professor, author, and political commentator

Links: https://www.facebook.com/messages/504376805#!/RBReich

http://robertreich.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Reich

Keith who?

Quote of the day

"Newt Gingrich is to hypocrisy what Mitt Romney is to principle." --Robert Reich, political economist, professor, author, and political commentator. Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Reich

Quote of the day

"Vandals burn down U.K. because a gangster is shot. Republicans burn down U.S. because a billionaire may be taxed." --Yonah W Grossman, Comedian, Social Commentator, Link: http://www.ywgrossman.com/ (also on Facebook).

Olbermann quits--or is fired from--"Countdown"

Or so you would think.

Yi.

Chill, people.

Quote of the day--on fear and anger

"The older I get, the more it seems to me that fear is at the root of so many of our reactions to these events. But because we do not respect fear, we turn to anger as its less useful proxy... It seems strange to me that the richest and most powerful country on Earth, with a free-flowing access to information, many avenues to disseminate it, continues to be ruled in some important aspects by fear of the unknown, especially at a time when it is possible to know a very great deal. I wonder what kind of leadership it would require to allow us to experience this world as the wonderfully surprising place that it is, as my neighbor put it, instead of lurching from panic to panic." --Michel Martin, Commentator, Writer, Journalist for NPR, National Public Radio Link to original post: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128622297