Obama to blink first on Social Security
By: Robert Kuttner
Politico: December 16, 2010
The tax deal negotiated by President Barack Obama and Senate
Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky is just the first part of a
multistage drama that is likely to further divide and weaken Democrats.
The second part, now being teed up by the White House and key Senate
Democrats, is a scheme for the president to embrace much of the
Bowles-Simpson plan - including cuts in Social Security. This is to be
unveiled, according to well-placed sources, in the president's State of the
Union address.
The idea is to pre-empt an even more draconian set of budget cuts
likely to be proposed by the incoming House Budget Committee chairman, Rep.
Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), as a condition of extending the debt ceiling. This is
expected to hit in April.
White House strategists believe this can also give Obama "credit" for
getting serious about deficit reduction - now more urgent with the nearly
$900 billion increase in the deficit via the tax cut deal.
How to put this politely? For a Democratic president, this approach is
bad economics and worse politics.
For starters, cutting Social Security as part of a deficit reduction
deal is needless - since Social Security is in surplus for the next 27
years. The move also gives away the single most potent distinction between
Democrats and Republicans - Democrats defend your Social Security, and
Republicans keep trying to undermine it.
If you think the Democratic base feels betrayed by Obama's tax-cut
deal, just imagine the mayhem when Obama proposes to cut the Democrats'
signature program.
Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) compared Obama's tax deal to punting on
first down. A pre-emptive cut in Social Security is forfeiting the game
before kickoff.
Obama is already in trouble with older voters. Republicans have
succeeded in convincing seniors that the health care reform bill diverted
money from Medicare.
Consider what the right will do when Obama moves to cut Social
Security. Republicans, with no sense of contradiction or hypocrisy, will
whack Obama once for not being sufficiently serious about deficit
reduction - then whack him again for cutting Social Security.
As for the Republicans' leverage on raising the debt ceiling, a more
resolute president would dare the Republicans to jeopardize government
bonds, just as President Bill Clinton dared Speaker Newt Gingrich to shut
down the government. One hopes that Clinton, in his recent visit to the
White House, reminded Obama that Gingrich blinked first. But Obama's
trademark is that he blinks first.
There was brief talk in the House Democratic Caucus on Tuesday night
of tying an extension of the debt ceiling to the tax deal, to deprive the
Republicans of that leverage. But that support crumbled in the face of White
House lobbying and overwhelming Senate support for the deal. Obama, who
gives in repeatedly to Republicans, turns out to be highly skilled at
isolating Democrats.
Beltway Washington - the editorial writers, columnists, centrist
policy organizations, Blue Dogs and, of course, the Obama administration and
its Wall Street advisers - has become an echo chamber of bad advice.
Slaying the deficit gets top billing - generating a strong economic
recovery is offstage. A smaller deficit is said to promote recovery by
increasing confidence - though nobody can give a plausible explanation of
the economics.
Destroying government's capacity for social investment seems now only
a tertiary concern for the White House - though a prime Republican goal. In
this weird inversion, being willing to sacrifice the Democrats' best-loved
programs is taken as a sign of Democratic resolve.
Obama is finally getting the bipartisanship he craved - but entirely
on Republican terms.
Republicans win three ways. They have a Democratic president doing
their work for them, destroying the Democratic capacity to use affirmative
government to address dire national problems and annihilating his own party.
And all this before they even take over the House.
Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect and author of "A
Presidency in Peril."
© 2010 Capitol News Company, LLC
***
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/speaking_ill_of_the_best_and_the_brightest_20101221/
Speaking Ill of 'the Best and the Brightest'
Robert Scheer
Truthdig: December 22, 2010
One of "the best and the brightest" died last week, and in Richard Holbrooke
we had a perfect example of the dark mischief to which David Halberstam
referred when he authored that ironic label. Holbrooke's life marks the
propensity of our elite institutions to turn out alpha leaders with
simplistic world-ordering ambitions unrestrained by moral conscience or
intellectual humility.
Fresh from Brown University, Holbrooke marched off as a foreign service
officer to win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese, who were not buying
it. He quickly became involved with the pacification program that herded
peasants off their land into barbed-wire encampments while we bombed the
surrounding areas.
Holbrooke was later so successful in the infamous CIA Phoenix program to
kill Vietnamese civilians thought to be sympathetic to the Viet Cong that at
the age of 24 he was brought back to Washington to work under the head of
that program, R.W. Komer, on a top-level White House command to save Vietnam
from the Vietnamese.
While in Washington, Holbrooke came to write a chapter of the secret
Pentagon Papers study that exposed the falsehoods justifying the war. Shades
of the WikiLeaks disclosures-when Daniel Ellsberg, who also worked on that
report, revealed it to the world, the lies stood exposed. As Defense
Secretary Robert McNamara acknowledged decades after commissioning the
study, 3.5 million Indochinese died in a war that had little if anything to
do with our national security. He concluded that he could indeed be judged a
"war criminal," except that appellation is reserved for leaders of lesser
states, like the Serbian and Iraqi leaders whose war crimes Holbrooke would
later trumpet as excuses for other U.S. wars.
Holbrooke not only failed to learn from the U.S. mistakes in Vietnam; he
repeated them in working for every Democratic president to follow. When
Jimmy Carter was elected, there was Holbrooke as an assistant secretary of
state supporting the Islamic mujahedeen in Afghanistan, a group fighting the
Soviet-backed secular government in Kabul.
Indefatigable in his hubris, Holbrooke also got Carter to support a
Cambodian exile coalition based in Thailand to attempt to overthrow the
Vietnamese-backed government in Cambodia that had ousted the mass murderer
Pol Pot. The fact that the coalition included this man who had killed
millions of his own people did not perturb Holbrooke. I have written
elsewhere of Holbrooke's arrogance in defending the U.S. backing of the
coalition at a dinner at the home of legendary television producer Norman
Lear; on that evening Holbrooke went off about the critical importance that
a regime change in tiny Cambodia would hold for the future of civilization.
In recent years Holbrooke was influential in getting the Obama
administration to commit to the folly of the U.S. surge in Afghanistan. Once
again he was all about winning the hearts and minds of people who, as it
appears from the WikiLeaks diplomatic memos, thought he was bonkers-as did
quite a few in the U.S. military.
Throughout Holbrooke's career, and this is the persistent theme in his
fawning obituaries, there was the apologia that whatever he did, his motives
could not be questioned, for after all his was a life largely of public
service. But here too the elite notion of public service is on sordid
display if one follows Holbrooke through the revolving platinum door from
public power to business greed. After messing up Cambodia and Afghanistan
during the Carter years, Holbrooke teamed up with another Democratic Party
operative, James Johnson, to form the business consulting firm Public
Strategies while at the same time serving as an adviser at Lehman Brothers.
The two proved quite successful in the business world, selling their company
to Lehman Brothers, where Holbrooke became a managing director. Johnson went
on to head Fannie Mae, presiding over its reckless expansion into the
subprime and Alt-A housing market.
From 2001 to 2008 Holbrooke teamed up again with Johnson to head Perseus
LLC, a private equity firm. During that same period, Holbrooke became a
director of AIG, the insurance company whose credit default swaps almost
brought down the economy and which required a $170 billion bailout from the
taxpayers.
In the New York Times obituary on the "brilliant" Mr. Holbrooke, only a
single short paragraph out of 32 refers to his career in the now-troubled
financial markets: "Mr. Holbrooke also made millions as an investment banker
on Wall Street. . At various times he was a managing director of Lehman
Brothers, vice chairman of Credit Suisse First Boston and a director of the
American International Group."
The Times did not mention that Holbrooke left AIG, where he had been paid
$268,000 a year plus stock options, two months before the insurer imploded.
Further evidence that "the best and the brightest" had the same success with
our banking system as they did in foreign policy.
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