2009 Economic Stimulus

Obama Must Toss the Bums Out of Treasury, End the Wars and Start Leading

dlindorff — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 12:13:46 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

If you are sitting in class taking a test, and you’ve chosen to sit
amongst your bone-headed, slacker friends, don’t turn to them for help
when you can’t figure out of any of the answers. They may all tell you
the same thing, but they’ll all be wrong.

That’s the situation President Obama finds himself in today in the
White House. Having surrounded himself with the very Wall Street con
men who set up the crooked game that led to the current financial
crisis and economic collapse, and finding that the lousy advice they
have been giving him since last January has left the country still
mired in deepening economic decline, with the banks still not lending
and unemployment still mounting, and with growing signs that instead of
bottoming out and starting to recover, the economy is threatening to
fall a second time, to new lows and higher unemployment, Obama has
turned to the same rotten advisors for answers.

A few days ago, in an interview with Fox-TV while he was in China
off all places (a country that has made a stupendous stimulus
investment to create domestic jobs!) Obama warned, for the first time,
that America faces the possibility of a “double-dip” recession. That’s
fine as far as it goes. I agree. But what did he say the risk was? Not
that the government has been failing to put significant numbers of
people back to work, but that the government keeps piling up deficits.

This has to be the lamest economic thinking since Herbert Hoover
started tightening the screws on government spending at the onset of
the Great Depression in 1930.

Clearly the American government needs to do just the opposite of
worrying about deficits. The only growth the US economy has seen to
date has been the result of government funding—the cash-for-clunkers
program gave a brief restoration of pulse to the auto industry, and the
$8000 tax credit for buying a first home kicked up home sales briefly.
We know this because when the clunkers program ended, auto sales
crashed, and when the deadline approached for the end to the new home
tax credit, home building plunged almost 11%. The hundreds of billions
of dollars poured into so-called “shovel-ready” state and local
projects like roads, schools, etc., may have added or saved as much as
a million jobs, but the economy lost many times that many jobs over the
same period.

The problem with these stimulus programs is that they are
inefficient ways to create jobs or preserve jobs. If roughly one
million jobs were created through the stimulus spending of say $200
billion (assuming that the February $800-billion stimulus program, to
mollify Republicans, consisted of one-half tax cuts and only one-half
actual federal spending, and that this federal spending was spread
evenly over a two-year period, that’s $200,000 per job!

If, instead, Obama had chucked the dunces at Treasury and in his
Council of Economic Advisors, and instead asked your Labor Secretary to
initiate a wide-ranging $200-billion-per-year jobs program, hiring the
unemployed at perhaps $20-25,000 per person to do everything from teach
in overcrowded urban schools to laying high-speed rail trackbeds, from
cleaning up parks to putting insulation in homes, he could have given
jobs to close 8 million people—people who would have then spent their
money on goods and services and helped rally the economy from the
bottom up.

Deficits? Who gives a damn about deficits at this point! The
country is up to the gills in debt without creating any jobs. (It’s
kind of like my mortgage. Why would I worry about using my credit card
to buy food for the week if I was low on cash, when my mortgage has me
deep in the red for the next ten years? Obama’s financial advisors, on
the evidence, would tell me I should let my family go hungry, because I
need to worry about my total debt load.) If you’re worried about
deficits, Mr. Obama, end the god-damned wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It is costing one million dollars a year to send one lousy grunt to
Afghanistan or Iraq. And you want to have at least 100,000 guys over
there. That’s $100 billion a year right there—enough to hire four
million unemployed Americans back here at home!

This president is well on the way to rescuing President Hoover from
history’s crap heap by one-upping him in the realm of economic
mismanagement. We already have Obamavilles springing up around the
country. We haven’t started calling them that, but Naming Day isn’t far
off.

At least Hoover didn’t mire the country in another war while the economy was collapsing around him.

President Obama is on a short leash at this point. His fans, and I
was one of those who was willing to give him a shot last November, are
mostly giving up on him. Activists are already turning on him. My union
friends are disgusted. My African-American friends just shake their
heads in dismay. Liberal friends act embarrassed. A leftist friend,
retired, who devoted a month to campaigning for Obama full time in
Pennsylvania last fall now writes angry letters almost weekly to
Obama’s former campaign manager David Plouffe and others, blasting
Obama’s handling of the bank crisis and his Afghan War plans. Clearly
Obama cannot continue to appease Republicans and cater to Blue Dogs in
Congress and expect to be re-elected in 2012.

Indeed, if he doesn’t toss the crooks and charlatans in the Fed,
the Treasury and his Council of Economic Advisers out, and doesn’t stop
listening to the self-serving crazies in the military, he won’t even
have a Democratic majority in Congress by the end of next year.

President Obama, aren’t you tired of being an embarrassment to your
friends and family? Aren’t you tired of being mocked by your foes?

Come on. We’re sick of your speeches! Suck it up, be a
leader.finally and kick some butt. Do something unconventional and
daring. End the wars, bring the troops home, announce a huge jobs
program, issue an executive order expanding the Medicare program, raise
taxes on the wealthy to back where they were in the 1960s, and let’s
get the country moving forward again.
__________________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest
book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work
is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

2010 Looms: Democrats Crash and Burn in Virginia and New Jersey

dlindorff — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 10:58:27 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

It would be easy to read too much into the few statewide races that
were decided last night, but I think it’s fair to say that the results
in New Jersey and Virginia, where Republican gubernatorial candidates
won--in New Jersey’s case knocking off a well-funded Democratic
incumbent--that the results were a blow to the Barack Obama/Rahm
Emanuel strategy of playing to the right, of avoiding confrontation in
Congress and of ignoring the progressive voters whose enthusiasm and
effort back in the 2008 campaign put Obama in office.

Exit polls showed that many Obama voters sat out this election in
New Jersey and Virginia, with turnout low in both races. In part that
was because of local conditions, of course. In Virginia, Democrat R.
Creigh Deeds ran as a conservative, and was attacked by the Republican
candidate, former state attorney general Robert McDonnell, as a
tax-happy liberal. With liberal voters in Virginia unenthusiastic about
Deeds, and Republicans revved up, the loss was a foregone conclusion,
even with Obama making two visits to campaign for Deeds, and with the
national Democratic Party pumping in $6 million in campaign funding.

In New Jersey, incumbent Democrat John Corzine was wildly unpopular
for raising taxes, so that even with Democrats holding an almost 2:1
registration advantage in the state (half of all voters are
unaffiliated), he too had no enthusiastic backing from his former base.
No amount of money poured in by the former Goldman Sachs chief
executive could overcome the negative views of his record as governor.

But despite the lackluster candidates in both Virginia and New
Jersey, I think it’s safe to say that there was also clear evidence
that the losses, and the margins of the losses—huge in Virginia’s case,
and significant in normally safely Democratic New Jersey—provide
evidence that the Obama presidency, and the prevailing Democratic
strategy of minimalist legislative initiatives on health care reform,
global warming etc., expanded and unending war in Afghanistan, support
for Wall Street and neglect of the one-in-five Americans who are
unemployed or underemployed, are a political disaster in the making for
Democrats in general and Obama in particular.

The president came into office on a wave of populist enthusiasm and
high expectations for the “change” candidate Obama promised. No change
has been forthcoming now for over nine months, and with the president
now past the first-year anniversary of his historic election victory,
the latest election results suggest that his presidency could already
be headed for the rocks.

2010 is an election year that will see all seats in the House, and
a third of the seats in the Senate up for grabs. Typically, a
president’s party loses seats in that election even when things are
going well. When things are not going well, the losses can be
significant.

Obama had a chance, coming into Washington after a big rout of
Republicans last year, to set out an agenda of major progressive
change. He could have called for expanding Medicare to cover all
Americans. Instead he handed health reform over to Congress and
immediately put out the word that he was open to compromise with
Republicans, thus dooming reform from the outset. He could have
announced a thorough review of America’s two wars, and then set in
motion a withdrawal form both Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead he dithered
on Iraq, and added troops in Afghanistan, assuring that both these
disasters inherited from the Bush/Cheney administration became his own
disasters, which will now drag on through his whole term. He could have
declared a global climate emergency, and announced a job-creating crash
program to develop renewable energy in the US and to make the US a
leader in renewable energy R&D. Instead, he did almost nothing in
this critical area. As for the economic crisis, he could have taken a
progressive stand against the abuses of Wall Street, ordered a criminal
investigation of the banking class, broken up the big banks and
established a new regulatory system to put an end to the era of casino
capitalism. Instead, he put the bankers in charge of Treasury and
poured trillions of dollars into the largest banks, allowing them to
grow even bigger and more predatory.

Voters, their collective assets shrunken over the year by $14
trillion, understandably are left wondering how, aside from better
verbal skills, this president differs from the last one. As for the
Democratic Congress, with Democrats pretending that nothing can be done
unless they have not just 60 seats in Congress, but perhaps 70 or 75
(enough to be able to survive the inevitable defection of conservative
members of the party), they can’t do anything of consequence—a claim
that only is true if, as is the case, the party’s leadership and the
president are unwilling to punish those who break rank.

If Democratic and progressive independent voters feel the same way
about Obama and the Democratic Congress next fall, it will be curtains
for the Democrats and for Obama’s presidency, such as it is.

And you know what? It won’t matter much if that happens, because
what we’re seeing is that having Obama in the White House, and
Democrats “in control” of Congress doesn’t get you much in the way of
progressive change.
___________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest
book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work
is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Our Out-of-Whack Economy and the Happy Talk Propagandists

dlindorff — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 14:42:23 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

If you listen to the happy-talk folks at Treasury and the Fed, and
on the tube, you’d think things had finally turned a corner. The
economy grew at a 3.5% annualized rate in the third quarter ended
September 30. “The Economy is Back in Gear” shouted the headline on an
article by CNN senior writer Chris Isadore. “The recession ended
unofficially in September,” said a reporter on NPR.

There was some mention of the fact that earlier in the week there
were reports that consumer confidence had fallen, foretelling a
sluggish Christmas retail season, and that new home sales slipped an
unanticipatedly high 3.6% in September, when analysts had been
expecting a rise in sales. Meanwhile, new unemployment claims filed
during the third week of October jumped to 531,000, well above the
predicted 520,000, indicating that the official unemployment rate is
likely to top 10% in the next Department of Labor report due out in
early November. As well, fully one-third of the nation’s homeowners
were now said to be “underwater,” meaning that their outstanding
mortgage balances are greater than the current value of their homes.
Not surprisingly, foreclosures are continuing to surge.

How to explain this seeming oxymoronic situation? Well, that
positive economic growth figure, which comes on the heels of a 6.4%
decline in GDP in the first quarter and a .7% decline in the second
quarter, is, according to government analysts, actually largely the
result of two government stimulus programs—the “cash for clunkers”
program that induced people to rush out and buy a new car (usually a
much smaller, cheaper and, for the car makers, less profitable one than
they had been buying in prior years), and the $8,000 new home tax
credit, which led a lot of people to rush out and buy a first home.

The thing about those two stimulus programs is that they don’t so
much expand economic activity as they push it forward. That is to say,
a person who takes advantage of the cash-for-clunker program is
generally someone who owns a worn-out junker and needs to buy a new
vehicle anyhow, so what the government subsidy does really is just push
that purchase forward. Once the program ended, sales of cars plummeted
(not to mention that the bulk of the payments went to people who
purchased foreign cars, so the economic boost was just for dealers in
the US, not car makers). The same is true with houses. Very few people
would make the decision about whether to buy a home or not based on
just $8000, but the availability of an $8000 government subsidy for a
limited time would lead people to push forward their plan to purchase a
home.

What that means is, don’t count on this “recovery” to last into
next year. The cars that needed to be bought have been bought, and the
homes that people wanted to buy have been bought. The car subsidy is
gone now, and even extending the home buying subsidy, as the realty
industry lobby is pressing Congress to do, isn’t going to induce that
many more people to buy.

Meanwhile it’s worth noting an oddity about this “recovery” being
trumpeted in government and media. The relationship between the dollar
and the stock market has become very strange. If you look back at
stories on these two things to 2007, before the financial crisis hit,
and earlier, you’ll see myriad articles explaining that the dollar and
the US stock market tend to move in tandem. This was always explained
as being because as the dollar strengthens, foreign investors want to
put their money into dollar-denominated assets. Similarly, if the
dollar weakened, analysts would write confidently that the stock market
would be hurt as investors pulled their money out of US equities to
invest in markets denominated in appreciating currencies.

Now, the analysts say that as equities strengthen, the dollar will
fall, but if equities fall, the dollar will appreciate. The reason for
this new inverse relationship should be cause for considerable alarm.
Why? In fact, it turns out that the last eight months of a rising
equities market has been largely the direct result of a shrinking
dollar. This is because so much of the sales and earnings of companies
in the S&P 500 and the much narrower Dow Index are earned overseas,
denominated in foreign currencies, but accounted for on the books of
these US-incorporated firms in dollars, that as the dollar declines in
value, corporate sales and earnings appear to be growing. Reportedly,
as much as 80 percent of the appreciation in the S&P Index since
last March 9 when the market hit bottom can be attributed to the
dollar’s fall against major world currencies.

Financial writers and reporters on TV don’t mention this tectonic
shift. They just report the new relationship (Stocks up, dollar down,
stocks down, dollar up) as though that’s they way it’s always been. But
actually, this is a phenomenon has normally ben characteristic of Third
World, so-called “developing” economies. That since the end of 2008 it
has become characteristic of the US economy should be cause for concern.

So don’t be conned by the happy talk salesmen at the Fed and
Treasury and in the White House, or by their propagandists in the
newsmedia, who are trumpeting the latest GDP growth figure as a sign
that the recession is over, apparently in the hopes that people will
run out to the mall and start spending (in those remaining stores that
don’t have their windows taped or covered in plywood). What we’ve seen
was a blip on the chart, engineered by a couple of “going out of
business” sales by the car and housing industry.

Real unemployment—measured the honest way it used to be 30 years
ago, to include those who have given up looking for work or who are
working part time involuntarily—is hitting 20% (for those who are bad
at math, that’s one out of five working-age Americans). Foreclosures
are hitting a record. Half of laid-off workers are cashing out their
401(k)s in order to buy food. State and local governments, both major
employers, are hitting a wall as tax collections plummet and federal
stimulus funds run out. This is not the foundation for a renewal of
economic growth; it is the precondition for a renewed or prolonged
recession.

And if the dollar continues its slide, which is likely given the
US’s huge budget deficits and trade deficits, as well as the Federal
Reserve’s inability to raise interest rates (a move that could
strengthen the dollar but which would crush the economy), all those
things that Americans buy abroad which are no longer made at home, as
well as the oil that is imported, will cost that much more, driving
consumers further into the hole. And remember, 70% of US GDP is
consumer spending, a result of our decimation of our industrial base.

Recession ending? Don’t bet on it.

_______________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based investigative journalist.
His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press,
2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

CONSUMER FINANCIAL PROTECTION: WHY ESSENTIAL

seeingbeyondthetrees — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 12:30:40 -0400

Regulating And Monitoring Financial Businesses: An Essential Key To Your Life

Before the TD Bank "gliche" situation I felt that I was a lone voice crying out in the wilderness of apathy. For twenty years or so, my credit union took money out of my account with out authorization, charged me "insufficient fees" after taking the money, had no specific customer service information, refused to cash my checks, refused to release money during ATM transactions, utilized a teller phone and online banking system that was always failing, harassed me and tried to get me arrested when I continually complained. The credit union recently closed both my accounts and banned me from using any of its resources. I was placed in a "shares" account that I can't do anything with. The National Credit Union Administration did nothing to assist me. I had no choice but to keep complaining. My complaining led to the setting up of the credit union's "Supervisory Committee" to supposedly address concerns. Until I complained to my State Representative and the NCUA this credit union attempted to ignore me. The Supervisory Committee began a campaign to get me either arrested or ousted from credit union membership. This information was revealed to my family by a credit union employee.

Hopefully the Consumer Financial Protection Agency will have more power than Consumer Affairs or the Better Business Bureau. These agencies have helped me in the past. With the CFPA, I will be able to file a complaint as I have with the other agencies and they will take it from there. Credit Unions, Banks, and Financial establishments will be motivated by the CFPA's presence to conduct business in a lawful an ethical fashion.

Please contact the President and your Congresspersons to vote CFPA legislation into law!

Gary Colin

Monmouth County, New Jersey

Loook Out Below! They Call this Season 'Fall' for a Reason

dlindorff — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 10:54:48 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

So now it turns out that the whole Troubled Assets Relief Program
(TARP) was a flop or more likely a scam. Remember Bush Treasury
Secretary Henry Paulson telling us last September that credit markets
had locked up, and then, after half of the $750 billion that he
extorted out of Congress was handed out to Wall Street firms, new
President Barack Obama justifying the spending of the second half of
the money because we needed to “get the banks lending again”?

Well, now Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general for TARP, is
telling us that all that money, and another more than $2 trillion in
loans, accomplished nothing. In an interview
with Lagan Sebert, published in Huffington Post, Barofsky says, “We
were told by Treasury that the purpose of the TARP fund was to increase
lending. But we haven’t increased lending.”

Well yeah, that’s true. Just ask any ordinary working stiff. My
little bank, the Harleysville National Bank here in eastern
Pennsylvania, far from expanding lending, has been shutting down
customer credit lines. As a bank manager told me, they were “reviewing
all our equity lines” in light of declining property values (actually,
property values in our area north of Philadelphia have remained pretty
stable). In general, banks across the country have been canceling
credit lines, closing credit card accounts on customers deemed
risky—including small businesses—and making it very hard to get a new
mortgage. (They’ve also been raising all kinds of fees, ripping
customers off in other ways, but that’s another story.)

And that goes for the biggest banks that got billions of dollars in taxpayer bailout funds.

Barofsky has been trying doggedly to find out whatever happened to
all that money of ours that was shoveled out to the banks, and as he
reports, he’s been working not just without any help from the Treasury
Department, but actually against the active resistance of Treasury,
which he accuses of having tried to dissuade him from even looking into
it.

“My biggest surprise,” he says, “is when we announced an audit (of
TARP), Treasury went out of their way to say…it would be a big waste of
time.” He says Treasury officials including Treasury Secretary Tim
Geithner, claimed that it would be impossible to find out where the
money went, on the argument that money is “fungible”—that is to say all
money is the same. Of course this is a cynical and ridiculous
assertion. If it were true, there would be no job for auditors, since
all auditors do is look to find out where money went. (Imagine telling
an IRS auditor that it is a waste of time auditing your books, because
money is fungible!)

In any event, Barofsky has gone about his work, with or without the
backing of the Obama Treasury Department, and what he found is that
instead of lending out the money that they were provided with by
taxpayers, the banks have been “acquiring other institutions, sitting
on it, paying down credit lines,” and, of course, paying out obscene
bonuses to executives.

The one thing the banks are not doing is lending.

But then, as I wrote last February, it was silly to think that by
shoveling money into banks during a record recession, the banks would
then lend it out. First of all, there was the awkward reality that good
companies were and still are not looking to borrow money. Rather, they
are trying to pay down debt and get their balance sheets on more solid
ground to survive a period of low or declining sales and earnings. The
only companies that would be trying to borrow right now would be the
ones that were on the rocks, and wanted money just to stay afloat. And
what banker would lend to them? And second, if the banks could make
more money by investing their new cash instead of making risky loans
with it, why would they lend? So most of them just used the money to
invest in Treasury Bonds.

The long and the short of it is that we’ve been taken for a very
big and costly ride by banks that created a huge crisis and that then
got the government to bail them out of it with our money, and by two
administrations, one Republican and now one Democratic, that have been
submissive and willing servants of the big banks.

The big surprise to me has been Paul Volcker, who I mistakenly took
to be an over-the-hill relic and Wall Street patsy. The former Carter
and Reagan-era Federal Reserve Board chairman, currently chair of
President Obama’s economic advisory panel, is publicly warning
that the president’s bank policies are preserving a system of giant
banks that are “too big to fail,” and are risking further, even larger
bailouts.

Barofsky agrees, saying that since the bailout, under Obama’s bank
policies, big banks already deemed “too big to fail” have become even
bigger, and he concludes, “We may be in a far more dangerous place
today than we were in a year ago,” for having told certain financial
companies that we will not let them fail.

Little wonder that the smart money—that would be the insiders in
corporate boardrooms and executive suites—is reportedly selling shares
as fast as they can be sold, with the experts reporting
that insider sales of company stock are running 31:1 on the sell side.
The explanation: with layoffs still running at over 500,000 a month,
and nobody hiring, these executives don’t see anything in the year
ahead or even longer that is likely to put the economy on a renewed
growth path.

Putting these bits of news together doesn’t paint a pretty picture:
We’ve got an economy that appears headed for at best a long period of
stagnation and, more likely, for a second downturn, once the effect of
last March’s stimulus package wears off. We’ve got a financial system
that has been propped up artificially, its balance sheets soggy with
underwater mortgages and worthless derivatives, and its executives
holding assurances that they can count on the government bailing them
out no matter what stupid or self-serving decisions they make. We’ve
got an economy that is 70% based upon consumer spending, in which one
in five people is unemployed or involuntarily underemployed. We’ve got
a nation that hardly makes anything, at the same time that its currency
is sinking like a stone, making imports increasingly expensive, And we
have a stock market that has been inflated into a giant bubble, just
waiting to pop.

October should be an interesting month this year.
_______________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-area journalist. His latest book is
“The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is
available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Clinton and Obama: The Worst and Best Thing to Happen to the Democratic Party in Years

dlindorff — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 13:20:06 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Bill Clinton was the worst thing to happen to the Democratic Party
and to progressives since that racist warmonger Woodrow Wilson won the
presidency and dragged the US into the utterly pointless and incredibly
bloody First World War.

Clinton, by posing as a progressive, confused and undermined, and
ultimately betrayed the liberal/progressive wing of the party,
shattering what was left of the New Deal coalition and leaving the
American left adrift and riven by the conflict between those who
thought the Democratic Party was the only viable vehicle for
progressive reform and those who thought it was hopelessly in the grip
of corporate interests.

Barack Obama offers the hope of bringing that era of debilitating confusion to an end.

Not because he is the Great Black Hope of progressives, but because
he has taken the concept of selling out to corporate interests and
compromising with Republicans to such remarkable heights that
progressives hopefully can no longer be confused about the
irretrievably corrupted nature of the Democratic Party.

On virtually every issue of importance, President Obama has sided with corporate interests and the wealthy.

On the issue of war and peace, he has sided with the
military-industrial complex, with a policy of permanent occupation of
Iraq and endless war in Afghanistan, as well as continued funding of
the country’s colossal armory of death, from strategic missiles and
submarines to aircraft-carrier-group armadas to high-tech fighter
squadrons and space weaponry.

On civil liberties, he has sided with the police state, supporting
continuation of the Bush/Cheney administration’s insidious National
Security Agency spying program, defended military spying within the US,
and refused to prosecute obvious abuses by the prior administration.

On torture, the Obama administration is continuing the imprisonment
and torture of captives in Afghanistan and elsewhere around the world
at Bagram Air Base and, probably, at other secret sites, and instead of
closing Guantanamo as promised, is looking into transferring that
hellhole of torture and abuse to one or several sites in the mainland
US.

Health care reform has become a sad joke, with the emerging
“reform” bill looking for all the world like the Rube Goldberg creation
of the Clinton era that properly went down in flames. Instead of taking
on the insurance industry, the hospital companies and the
pharmaceutical industry and other parts of the profit-making
medical-industrial complex, Obama cut deals with all of them behind
closed doors, assuring that their profits would be left untouched, and
that they could essentially write their own “reform” bill through the
offices of bought-and-paid members of Congress like Senator Max Baucus.
Obama and his congressional allies carefully kept any discussion of the
single-payer idea—essentially Medicare for all, and the approach that
even Obama himself admits would be cheaper and more universal—out of
sight and off the table.

Climate change action, too, has been sold out, with Obama adopting
the approach favored by the energy industry—“cap and trade.” That
concept is a gold mine for Wall Street trading firms, which will be
doing trades next in pollution credits instead of subprime mortgages,
and for energy companies which will get free credits to sell, courtesy
of the taxpayer. And because it’s a system so easy to game, it will do
nothing or next to nothing to reduce greenhouse gases.

Finally, there’s economy and banking reform. Here Obama didn’t even
make a pretense of taking a progressive approach. There is a stimulus
program, but half of it was in the form of tax cuts—token for the poor
and middle class and significant for the rich and for businesses, and
half in the form of federal grants, often for unneeded projects like
roads and road repair which go to some of the higher paid members of
the working class, leaving the poor and the ununionized with no job
help. Meanwhile, bankers were the recipients of trillions of dollars in
bailout assistance, while nothing was done to break up the huge
mega-bank holding companies that brought on the financial and economic
crisis in the first place. Instead of picking economic advisers and
bank regulators from the many talented system critics like Nobelists
Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, Obama picked veterans of the
Bush/Cheney administration, and Wall Street shills like Larry Summers
and Timothy Geithner.

Last fall, I and many progressives urged voters to elect Obama, not
because we thought he was a progressive, but because we hoped that his
background—community organizer, raised by a single mother, experience
living in a third world country (Indonesia), multi-racial—would lead
him to make at least some right decisions. We, or certainly I, hoped
too that the energized young and working class electorate that came out
for him in the fall would continue to press him aggressively to do the
right thing on war, environment, civil liberties and the economy.

I was wrong on the first count: Obama has been a corporatist
through and through on all the major issues that matter. And I was
wrong on the second. Most of the left in the US, from the labor
movement to the environmentalist movement to the anti-war movement, has
to date remained glumly quiescent as Obama has sold them out on each of
their key issues.

But here is the silver lining: The sell-out this time is so much
more blatant, and so much more serious, than it was with Clinton, and
for all the talk about Obama’s ability to string words together, he is
so much less of a charismatic figure than the gregarious Bill Clinton,
that he is unlikely to hang on to the ardent support that propelled him
to his victory last November. The disappointment and sense of betrayal
among progressives this time is palpable, especially because, while
Clinton, by 1994, had the excuse that he was working with a Republican,
or partially Republican Congress, Obama has solid control of both
houses, but refuses to use it. If, as I expect, the recession continues
to deepen, with more and more people losing jobs and homes, if, as I
predict, health care continues to be unaffordable and inaccessible, if,
as I know will happen, evidence of deadly climate change continues to
pile up, and if, as I am equally certain, Iraq explodes and the war in
Afghanistan continue to worsen, the left is going to see Obama and the
Democrats in Congress as the failures and corrupt frauds they are, and
will abandon them.

That leaves the question of what to do, and where those frustrated progressives will turn.

I don’t claim to have the answer to that. Clearly the labor movement
needs to recognize that hitching its fortunes to the Democratic Party
has been and will continue to be a dismal failure. It needs to pull all
its political money back and only support those who are 100% allies in
the struggle for the rights of workers. No money for the party as a
whole. It should also go back to the pioneering work of people like the
late Tony Mazzocchi of the Oil and Chemical and Atomic Workers Union,
who before his death was tirelessly working to establish an American
labor party.

Other third parties on the left need to drop their individual
agendas and work towards unity, especially with the labor movement, in
order to create a broad-based left party that doesn’t have litmus tests
for inclusion—just broad principles like steeply progressive taxation,
an end to NAFTA and the WTO, democratization of the Federal Reserve
Bank, national health care, a wholesale slashing of the military
budget, by perhaps two-thirds or more, free education through four
years of college for all, and a crisis plan to attack climate change.

If the ever fractious US left, and the somnolent labor movement,
cannot come together as one, there is little hope of political change
in America. At that point the alternative would be an increasing
militancy over these critical issues, outside of the electoral
arena—something that has to happen anyhow, regardless of whether a real
third party force can be put together. We know that simply organizing
occasional polite marches in Washington, or in key cities, accomplishes
nothing. We have learned that email campaigns to deluge members of
Congress with canned opinions don’t work. What has worked, and will
always work, is massive campaigns of civil disobedience, tent cities in
Washington, organized disruption of war preparations, and door-to-door
organizing. The corrupt hacks who inhabit the halls of Congress and the
White House will not do the right thing just because it is the right
thing, or because we ask them nicely. They may, if we make them fear
that they will actually lose our votes in the next election. For the
most part, incumbent Democrats know that the people who peacefully
march down Connecticut Avenue are still likely to vote for them come
the next election. They’re not going to be so sure about people who are
being hit by tear gas and water cannons and who are being hauled off en
masse to jail at protests.

We may need to start sending that stronger message.
___________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest
book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006). His work
is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net www.thiscantbehappening.net

Keeping It Real: This Recession Ain't Over by a Long Shot

dlindorff — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 13:16:36 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

The “happy talk” campaign in the US media and coming from the White House is just that: Happy Talk.

To get a real picture of what is happening with this economy, here are a few things to keep in mind.

Yes, the rate of decline in economic activity has slowed. But that
is to be expected. When an economy is going at full tilt, as the US
economy was doing in early 2007, a slowdown of any significance yields
huge numbers, in terms of falling production, falling factory
utilization, falling car sales, or, this time around, falling housing
prices.

But once you get to the same period in 2008, you’re already in a
deep recession, and there really isn’t that much farther to fall. If,
for example, the carmakers have basically shut down by fall of 2008,
and are just working off huge inventories, then you are not going to
see more factory closings and further reductions in production (how do
you reduce production below zero?).

The same can be said about unemployment, although here there is
another twist or two. Yes, the huge layoffs that saw the number of new
unemployed jumping by 6-700,000 per month in the early part of this
year seem to be over, and now new unemployment is rising by “just”
500,000 a month or so, but that’s because all the major employers have
already shut down or shut down entire shifts. There are not that many
people who can be laid off any more, at least in large groups. This
gets painted as “the pace of layoffs is slowing” as if that’s good
news, but it is the opposite.

But there is more trickery and misinformation regarding unemployment
statistics, too. One has to do with the oft-noted claim that the number
of people collecting unemployment benefits is declining—especially the
long-term unemployed. But the reason for this is not that people are
finally finding jobs. It’s that unemployment benefits are being
exhausted. The upper limit for collecting unemployment benefits in the
US is 79 weeks, and that’s only in some states where unemployment is
particularly high. In other states it is 72 weeks or even as low as 59
weeks.

Also, unemployment benefits, which reportedly average $300/week, but
can be a lot less depending upon where a particular person worked and
what state he or she lives in, are lost if a person does some part-time
work, and since nobody can support a family on $300 a week, many people
on unemployment end up getting part-time jobs and lose their
unemployment benefits. That’s not a good sign either.

Finally, unemployment benefits only cover about half of American
workers. The rest, because they have already only been able to find
part-time jobs, or because they’ve been working “off the books,” or
because they are so-called “independent contractors”—people like
gardeners, freelance writers, lawyers, consultants, plumbers,
etc.—aren’t covered by unemployment insurance. When they get laid off,
they are on their own. And increasingly, the layoffs and job losses in
this declining economy are falling on people in that category. The
early lay-offs were done by managements of big companies which looked
ahead, saw the downturn, and implemented “cost-cutting” measures, which
meant slashing production and laying off workers. Independent workers
and small businesses, whose owners are personally hit when they have to
shut down production or operations, have struggled to stay in business
as long as possible, but are now entering the jobless rolls at an
accelerating rate.

But, and here’s a crucial point, many of them simply don’t get
recorded by the government statisticians as being unemployed. Anyone
who works even a few hours a week at some odd job, or for free in a
family business, is not counted. Anyone who sees no job prospects out
there and just gives up isn’t counted. Anyone who finds a half-time
job, but needs a full-time job is counted as employed. It didn’t use to
be this way. In a more honest time, more than three decades ago, such
people were counted as unemployed, but politicians pushed to have them
excluded to keep the official unemployment numbers looking lower. If
all such people were added to the unemployment numbers we would have
unemployment in the US at over 18 percent, and possibly closer to 20
percent. That’s one in five Americans out of work.

And remember, even though we are now in an economy that is
functioning at a depressed level, it is still in decline, and those
unemployment numbers are rising, not stabilizing.

Put that together with the fact that Americans collectively have
lost $14 trillion in wealth. They’ve lost invested savings, which are
still down almost 20 percent from where they were a year ago, and don’t
appear likely to recover any time soon. (Remember, even if the stock
market falls 40 percent and then rises 40%, it will still be down.
Consider: If you had $1000 in vested in a broad index like the S&P,
and it dropped 40% as happened last fall, you lost $400, and have just
$600. If the market then recovered 40%, though, which it hasn’t by a
long shot, you only gain 40% of $600, or $240, so your portfolio is
still only back to $840.) That $14 trillion also includes the lost
value of people’s homes, which until 2008 were being used to prop up
living standards as people borrowed on the rising equity in their
property. With housing values in much of the country now down anywhere
from 20% to 80%, many homes are now worth less than the amount of money
still owed on people’s mortgages. They can’t sell, and often, they
can’t pay the mortgage check.

Where is the consumer spending supposed to come from that used to
represent a whopping 70% of economic activity in a United States that
long ago stopped making things? The answer is: nowhere. The amount of
lost wealth makes a joke of the celebrated Obama stimulus plan, which
was less than $1 trillion, and which is spread out over two years.

There is simply no money to restart the orgy of consumer spending that kept the US economy afloat for so long.

People can’t even borrow if they want to. Banks are not lending,
because they know that the happy talk is nonsense, and they don’t want
to loan money to people and businesses that are liable to go belly up
as the recession continues. That’s why card companies like American
Express and many Visa issuers, instead of just charging a late charge
when card-holders miss a monthly payment deadline as in the past, are
now just jacking up the interest rate they charge, --in American
Express’s case to 28% or over 2% a month! That’s not the action of a
bank that is expecting to get repaid by a customer—it’s the
extortionate action of a usurer that wants to extract as much money as
possible from a borrower that it expects to have go bust. Banks are
canceling personal and business credit lines right and left too, making
a joke of the Obama administration’s claim that it bailed out the banks
so that they would “start lending again.”

Even the story about housing sales improving is misleading. The
reason it is happening is that so many homes have foreclosed that the
sale of foreclosed homes by banks is now a significant part of the
total housing market.

Again and again, much of the “happy talk” we hear, if examined
closely, turns out to be bad news being misinterpreted, often
deliberately.

Finally, it should be added that because of massive unemployment,
which is approaching levels not seen since the Great Depression, and
because of the massive loss of personal wealth, this recession is not
likely to act like any of the other recessions of the post-World War II
era. These have all been “U” or “V”-shaped affairs, where economic
activity would either drop and then after lingering at a low level for
a while, recover at an accelerating rate, slowly recover as in a “U”,
or plunge precipitously to a sharp bottom and then quickly recover, as
in a “V”. This time, we are more likely to see an “L”-shaped recession,
where the economy hits bottom at some point, and then operates for
years at a much lower level. That lower part of that “L” might rise
slowly, but it wouldn’t rise by much. In this case, we would see
continued high levels of unemployment, lower wages, and no bounce-back
in personal wealth.

So if we’re want to make the correct policy decisions, not to
mention the right political decisions and personal financial and basic
life decisions, let’s cut the happy talk, and start keeping it real.

__________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-area journalist. His latest book is
“The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is
available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Using the Economic Crisis to Attack Workers: Employers Undermine Stimulus Program

dlindorff — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 13:21:47 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Reports are starting to appear suggesting that laid-off or
underemployed Americans, and the long-term unemployed, are losing
patience with the Obama administration’s and Congress’ economic
stimulus plan, which thus far has not done anything to arrest the
growth of unemployment, now at close to 20 percent of the US workforce,
at least as unemployment used to honestly be counted in the 1970s and
early 1980s.

While millions of jobs have been lost since the beginning of this
year alone, the number of jobs that have been created as a result of
the Obama administration’s signature $780-billion stimulus spending
package is under 150,000—a far cry from the 3.5 million that were
promised when the bill was being put before Congress.

There has been a lot of hype from Washington sources, dutifully
reported with little analysis or criticism in the corporate media,
suggesting that the recession is bottoming out. One example was a
report last week that the number of people receiving unemployment had,
for the first time in six months, dropped slightly. Unmentioned was the
hard reality that the reason for this drop was that many laid-off
workers are now reaching the end of their 26 weeks of unemployment
benefits in states that do not offer any extended benefits program. On
inspection, that is hardly good news.

There is also a mantra, trotted out regularly by administration
officials, that unemployment figures are a “lagging indicator,” and
thus are no indication that the recession is continuing to worsen. The
problem with this sleight-of-hand is that unemployment itself, when it
is rising rapidly as it has been now for a year, is a cause of
deepening recession. When one in five workers is unemployed or
unwillingly underemployed, that represents not only a huge drop in
consumer demand for everything from basic necessities to luxuries, but
also a huge dark cloud of anxiety that hangs over most of the rest of
the public, leading everyone to cut back on their spending, thus
dragging down the economy further.

But there is another factor at work, which is not getting much
attention, and that is the negative role being played by employers,
both public and private, in worsening the recession and undermining the
stimulus effort, such as it is, by actually using economic crisis as an
excuse to further attack and undermine workers and their incomes.

Take Temple University, where I live. The university, a largely
publicly-funded institution, has received $10 million in federal
stimulus funds, largely replacing the state funding that it lost when
the state cut back on its educational budget, and though those funds
were specifically intended by Congress to be used to improve student
achievement and to put people to work quickly, Temple, which has also
seen student admissions and tuition revenues increase during the
recession, has done the opposite—laying off staff, including
departmental staff and other personnel. The university for the past
year has also been engaged in a classic union-busting campaign against
one of its staff unions, which has been working 0n an expired contract
for a year, and its faculty union, which has been working on an expired
contract since last October. The school last year hired an outside law
firm, Ballard Spahr Andrews & Ingersoll, that on its website touts
its expertise in “union avoidance,” to handle the school’s “bargaining”
with faculty.

In this, Temple is hardly alone. Across the country, companies and
public institutions have been taking brutal advantage of the economic
crisis as an opportunity to attack their workers, slashing employment,
demanding pay cuts (the New York Times, for example, has cut
employee paychecks by 5%), reducing long-held benefits, and generally
contributing to the impoverishment and insecurity of the broader
American workforce. According to a recent report, 29 percent of
employers who had historically been offering their employees a match
for their own contributions to 401(k) retirement plans have eliminated
that matching money over the last year.

These cutbacks and layoffs are bad enough when made by private
firms, many of which are still quite profitable and which have
benefited over the years and recently from tax incentives aimed at boosting
employment, but they are particularly obscene when they are made by
institutions that are receiving public stimulus money, like schools,
public transit agencies, and state and local governments. Indeed, it’s
probably the case that much of the potential stimulus of the
taxpayer-funded stimulus plan has been negated by job cuts and pay cuts
being made by the state and local entities that have received the bulk
of that money. If a state, for example, uses $50 million in stimulus
funds to repair a bridge, in the process providing jobs to perhaps 100
construction workers, and then lays off 200 state workers, that
stimulus money is completely wasted in terms of boosting the economy.

So far, most of the frustration and anger over this undermining of
the economic stimulus program is coming from the unemployed. Taxpayers,
who will end up paying for this stimulus (all of which was borrowed
money) in future years, have so far not raised a fuss, perhaps because
they have not gotten the news that employers are busy undermining the
program. That could change if unemployment, as expected, keeps rising
inexorably. Maybe at that point people will start demanding that their
taxes be used by the federal government to directly employ people,
instead of trusting employers to pass it through to their workers, or
that at a minimum, organizations receiving stimulus program funds be
barred from laying workers off or cutting their pay.

______________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest
book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work
is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Where's the Anger as the Wheels Come Off Obama's and the Democrats' Recovery Program?

dlindorff — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 16:05:35 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

My bank, a small regional institution that was not involved in sub-prime lending, and that was not a recipient of any TARP bailout money, cut off my home equity line of credit two weeks ago. They did it abruptly, with no notice—I only discovered it had happened when I tried to get a $500 advance from it to cover a payment I was making on my credit card. When I asked what was going on, the local branch manager informed me that “we are closing out a lot of credit lines while we reassess the value of houses in this region, which have been falling.”

Now, in my particular case this was ridiculous. First of all, in our county, just north of Philadelphia, property prices have been static, but not falling. Furthermore, I had taken out a $160,000 mortgage 12 years ago, and it was now paid down to $60,000, and my balance on the home equity credit line was pretty small, so there was no way that we were in any way “under water”—in fact our equity in our home is much higher than it was 12 years ago.

The bank informed me that it was no problem. I could simply take out a new credit line, at no charge, and transfer the balance on the current line over to the new one. The only hitch: Instead of paying one percent over prime as I had been, I would be paying nearly 4 percent over prime on that balance, effectively doubling the cost of borrowing money.

This kind of thing is going on all across America, as banks that once spread around credit like a Philadelphia Democratic Party ward captain on Election Day, start tightening the screws on individuals and on small businesses.

While the Obama administration and the Treasury and the Fed are bulldozing funds into the coffers of the big banks, allegedly to get them to lend, the banks, from the largest to the smallest, are pulling back, afraid that borrowers will end up going bust on them. So much for economic stimulus efforts.

Not that borrowers have been lining up to get credit. Rather, most people, if they aren’t simply going bankrupt or letting collection agents harass them for nonpayment, are trying to pay off credit card balances, and to cut expenses. With official unemployment approaching 10%--a level it may hit this month—and real unemployment, as measured the way it used to be back in 1980, at closer to 20 percent, the majority of Americans not only have friends and family members who are unemployed or working part-time or at odd jobs involuntarily, but are worried about getting the axe themselves.

Meanwhile, the short-lived but incredibly expensive Obama rescue program, like a stagecoach at the end of a spaghetti western chase scene, is about to have the wheels fall off and go sliding over a cliff.

Bond yields and commodity prices are spiking as investors are waking up to the reality that massive borrowing by the US Treasury and massive printing of money by the Federal Reserve are going to lead to serious, perhaps even hyper inflation of the dollar. That in turn will force the Fed at some point, probably fairly soon, to raise interest rates, choking off not only those so-called economic “green shoots” that the cheerleading media have been citing as evidence that the recession is “bottoming out,” but also even the recent stock market rise, which was being touted as one of those signs of economic “spring.” On Tuesday, the interest rate or “yield” on the benchmark 10-year Treasury Bill jumped from 3.86% to 3.98 percent, and at one point went over 4%. Meanwhile, crude oil prices rose to over $70/barrel—an odd thing given the significant decline in demand caused by the global recession, but evidence that investors are anticipating a dollar slump and aren’t interested in supply and demand issues. Other commodity prices are also jumping for the same reason.

News that the big banks that were recipients of hundreds of billions of dollars in federal TARP loans were paying some of that money back to the government in order to be able to go back to their old ways was hardly reassuring. Those banks, like Bank of America and Citibank and Goldman Sachs, are not suddenly healthy. They have used accounting gimmicks to disguise the fact that they are what some economists have dubbed “zombies,” with bad debts far in excess of their assets. And they will stay that way, while enriching their top managers with bloated salaries and “bonus” payments, while keeping credit tight and available only to the absolutely best corporate borrowers.

Obama’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are going from bad to worse. There is no savings coming out of Iraq, as he had claimed would happen during last year’s presidential campaign, and even if there were, it’s all simply being transferred over to Iraq, where the US war effort is morphing from a small special forces operation into a full-scale war, destined to rival or even surpass the one in Iraq in terms of human and financial costs.

It’s all coming unglued, just as the president puts forward his signature program—a health care reform scheme that is supposed to guarantee health care for everyone in the country.

Fat chance that one has. When America’s economic house of cards finally really collapses, which looks to be starting to happen now, there simply won’t be any cash in the till for health care.

So far, most Americans remain unaware of the scale of this crisis. The news media continue to tout shamelessly whatever signs of recovery they can detect, leaving all those whose personal finances are falling apart to feel like it’s just their problem. Astonishingly, given the extent of the joblessness, there has been no national jobs march on Washington, no mass protests over the inadequacy of unemployment benefits, which reach only a minority of workers and are at levels far below what they were in prior recessions, no sit-down strikes at companies that are laying workers off or cutting salaries. The labor movement, such as it is at this point, is so wedded to Obama and the ruling Democrats, and so narrowly focused on trying to win passage of the seemingly doomed Employee Free Choice labor law reform bill, that the unions aren’t trying to organize any mass actions to demand economic justice.

Maybe this public passivity in the face of rampant corporate welfare and corporate pillage will come to an end as unemployment benefits begin to run out and unemployment rates continue to climb.

The coach is heading for the cliff, but there is still time for people to jump out.

_____________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and available on my website in signed collector edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

America's Future Moves Forward

davidswanson — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 23:17:49 -0400

By David Swanson

Every year in Washington, D.C., the Campaign for America's Future (CAF) convenes the largest conference of activists positioned anywhere to the left of wherever the center has drifted off to. Labor and community groups and civil rights groups play a big role, most of them strictly loyal to the Democratic Party. The focus is on domestic issues, and the approach is an inside strategy of nudging and honoring those in power. You can sense my cynicism, and yet this year I was very pleasantly surprised.

In past years the peace movement has protested, agitated, and self-organized, as the CAF has declined to include any panel discussions of war. It's been as if the conference planners had never heard of Iraq or Afghanistan, even while strategizing for elections and lamenting the lack of funds for non-military projects. Also in the past any panels on "accountability" have been extremely weak.

This year there was a panel on Afghanistan with four speakers, every one of them completely opposed to continuing the occupation. There was also a panel on excessive military spending at which three of the four panelists, including Congressman Barney Frank, proposed massive cuts in the military budget. And there was a panel on accountability at which all three speakers, including Congressman Jerrold Nadler, favored prosecuting torture and other crimes by high officials. Nadler stressed the extreme danger involved in not prosecuting such crimes, swore he would not be a rubber stamp for Obama as the Republicans had been for Bush, and declared that he would never be part of the first Congress to authorize preventive detention.

Each of these panels took place with several other panels occurring simultaneously in other rooms, but the plenary sessions that brought everyone together were encouraging as well. At a plenary on the Employee Free Choice Act, Senator Tom Harken said that if recalcitrant Democratic senators would not accept a reasonable compromise (and he spelled out what that meant) he would force a vote on the original bill and that one way or another it would pass. Larry Cohen of the Communications Workers of America urged everyone to demand of Democratic senators that they choose the side of working people over the Chamber of Commerce. "Which Side Are You On?" he shouted. "Some senators will say this is not the time because of the economy, but you cannot fix the economy without the Employee Free Choice Act: this is exactly the time!"

In a plenary on other economic issues, Robert Kuttner spoke first, with former progressive and current director of the vice president's task force on the middle class Jared Bernstein listening. Kuttner laid out everything wrong with the current trickle-down, give more money to Wall Street but not Main Street approach. And when Bernstein failed to address the criticisms, moderator Katrina Vanden Heuvel asked him again. He still didn't answer, but Kuttner and Vanden Heuvel had done an excellent job of amicably but directly presenting the case of the American people to a representative of those shipping our money off to the overclass.

Where the conference fell down was on another of its major focuses: healthcare reform. Just like Senator Baucus, the CAF refused to allow a single supporter of single-payer health coverage to take part in any of its plenaries, panels, or press conferences on healthcare. The approach of only asking for the inclusion of a "public option" is supposed to be strategic and smart, and yet the strongest means of winning that compromise would almost certainly be to push for single payer until forced to back off. It is also critical that we never agree to any ban on states enacting their own single-payer systems. But we can’t even raise that issue as long as mentioning single-payer is forbidden.

Until this year, the CAF's conference was always called "Take Back America." I never understood who had once had America or how they would take it back. Now the conference is called "America's Future Now." Many speakers claimed that "we" had taken America back and that putting Obama in the White House changed everything. Almost all proposals to lobby the government were framed as ways to "help Obama succeed" even if they were proposals to force Obama to do the exact opposite of what he clearly intends. All of this disturbed me, of course, but was what I had expected. Some of the big players, such as MoveOn.org for example, have completely dropped the pretense that they oppose wars (and of course only ever opposed Republican war supporters). But it is this corrupt partisan nature of the conference that makes its steps forward so stunning. Here is a group of people turning out in smaller numbers than in the past, because America has now been "taken back," and framing everything as a celebration of Obama. Here is a group of people that barely recognized the existence of Iraq in the past and, in fact, has yet to mention it. And yet here was a group of people coming out strongly against war and militarism precisely when their guy is now commander in chief. I think that speaks volumes.

So, three cheers to Robert Greenwald for putting together an excellent panel on Afghanistan and getting it into the program, and to Howard Dean for saying that single payer should have been included, and to Nadler and Frank and all the other participants in the panels that brought new life to a conference named with absurd exaggeration, but a conference that may perhaps have helped move a decent future a little bit closer to now.

UPDATE: Read this report too.