Here We Go Again: Obama Picks Big Bank, Big Telecom, and Big Phrama Lobbyist
to Be Chief of Staff
By Ari Berman,
The Nation: January 7, 2011
Rahm Emanuel is off running for mayor of Chicago, but his ghost will soon be
making a return to the White House in the form of fellow Chicagoan Bill
Daley, who President Obama is naming as Rahm's replacement today. The post
is currently filled by low-key Obama aide Pete Rouse.
Daley, brother of outgoing Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, was Commerce
Secretary under Bill Clinton, the chief architect of NAFTA, chairman of Al
Gore's 2000 presidential campaign, a top adviser/fundraiser for the Obama
campaign and, most recently, Midwest chairman of JP Morgan Chase. He shares
the corporate centrism of Emanuel and, when it comes to economic issues, may
be worse. AFL-CIO head John Sweeney once said that Daley stood "squarely on
the opposite side of working families."
Daley lobbied for telecommunications giant SBC, publicly chided the Obama
administration for pursuing healthcare reform (he serves on the board of
drugmaker Merck), advised the Chamber of Commerce on Wall Street regulation
(they wanted less of it) and reportedly urged Obama's team to drop the most
popular provision of the financial reform bill-the Consumer Financial
Protection Agency. When Daley joined the board of the corporate-aligned
Democratic group Third Way in July 2010, board chairman John Vogelstein said
that Daley's tasks would include "reforming entitlements"-a clever code word
for cutting Social Security and Medicare. Yet, despite all this, Obama is
making Daley the focal point of his White House in year three. Didn't the
president learn anything from Rahm's disastrous tenure at 1600 Pennsylvania
Avenue?
This week Politico reported that Republican House Oversight Chairman Darrell
Issa brazenly asked over 150 companies and trade associations to specify
which regulations and consumer protections they'd like to gut in the new
Congress. It was precisely the type of story Democrats should pounce on to
paint the GOP as a wholly owned subsidiary of corporate American. Instead,
the Obama administration is close to appointing a JP Morgan exec to burnish
its "pro-business" credentials. Talk about mixed messaging!
In fact, the Obama administration has tried its damndest to plot the
"moderate, centrist course" that Daley accuses them of forsaking-abandoning
the public option in healthcare reform, loading up the stimulus with tax
cuts, extending the Bush tax cuts, escalating the war in Afghanistan, and
stepping away from potentially divisive fights over immigration reform and
cap and trade. Indeed, it's amazing that the administration doesn't get more
credit from the business community for saving the banks, rescuing the auto
industry, stabilizing the economy and preventing another great depression.
Americans want jobs and relief from the federal government and Obama
administration, not another banker running the show.
Ari Berman is the author of Herding Donkeys: The Fight to Rebuild the
Democratic Party and Reshape American Politics.
***
http://www.thenation.com/article/157531/new-congress-and-coming-class-war
The New Congress and the Coming Class War
By Eric Alterman
The Nation: January 06, 2011
According to Newsweek's Jonathan Alter, the president recently told friends,
"All I want for Christmas is an opposition I can negotiate with." Well, he
had one, briefly, so long as he was willing to cave in to its demands to
bust the budget with a massive gift of more than $130 billion in tax cuts to
the wealthiest 2 percent of the country and the gutting of the estate tax.
That cleared the decks for other "victories" and "compromises" and led to
widespread insider approval of Obama's ability to "make the system work."
Like 13-year-olds at the movies, pundits love "action," period, never mind
its consequences.
t's hardly surprising that few of them noticed that even during this
decidedly brief Era of Good Feelings, Republicans refused to fund the
government through the end of the fiscal year. Instead, both parties agreed
to extend current levels of funding temporarily to avert an immediate
government shutdown, with the mutual understanding that the postelection
House will be much stingier than the old one. So Obama bought himself some
peace in Hawaii, but at the cost of returning home to a metaphorical house
on fire.
What is not understood by those who cover contemporary conservatives (and,
one fears, by those who negotiate with them) is that while they like to talk
about all kinds of values, these are always subordinated to a single,
unchanging and uncompromised goal: class warfare.
Think about it. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush talked incessantly about
fiscal responsibility and lost no opportunity to denounce deficit spending,
but these principles flew out the window when it came time to cut taxes on
the rich. The new bunch are even worse. Incoming House Ways and Means
Committee chair Dave Camp recently told George Will that one of the biggest
problems with our tax system is that too few poor people pay income tax.
In addition to the tax cuts, but far beneath the radar, Republicans fired
another volley in the right-wing class war by refusing to approve funding to
continue the Build America Bonds program. These bonds, which make up roughly
20 percent of all new debt sold by states and local governments because of a
federal subsidy equivalent to some 35 percent of interest costs, ended on
December 31, as Republicans proved unwilling even to consider renewing them.
The death of the program could prove devastating to states' future
borrowing. According to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, states
face a $140 billion budget shortfall next year; some predict that the figure
could rise to as much as $3 trillion over time when one includes unfunded
liabilities to pay for retiree benefits.
This serves the purpose of Republican class war in two respects. It forces
localities to slash their budgets for services like snow removal and public
schooling-a form of transfer payment from the wealthy to the rest of us. But
even more, it will eventually force localities to default on their pension
obligations, and thereby destroy the credibility of the public unions that
negotiated them. Note that they are doing this at a moment when the recovery
is imperiled by the loss of public-sector jobs. But forget the recovery;
Republicans Devin Nunes, Darrell Issa and Paul Ryan are co-sponsoring a bill
to demand that state and local governments recalculate the likely size of
their pension obligations in light of the downturn or risk the loss of the
right to issue tax-exempt bonds.
Hamtramck, Michigan, recently profiled in the New York Times, is the future
to which these Republicans look forward. The town already ceased taking care
of the trees and grass on public property and ran out of money for street
plowing just before the recent blizzard. Localities like Hamtramck are
getting little help from the state legislature, however. "All our
communities have done is cut, cut, cut," said Summer Hallwood Minnick,
director of state affairs for the Michigan Municipal League. "They're down
to four-day workweeks and the elimination of parks, senior centers, all of
that. So if there's anything else that happens, they will be over the edge."
Ditto Prichard, Alabama, which recently ceased mailing monthly pension
checks, in violation of state law. A retired fire marshal died in June and
was found without running water or electricity in his house. These are
extreme cases, but the danger is widespread. Rare is the locality whose
pension obligations are fully funded, and none are dealing with it terribly
responsibly. New Jersey, for instance, under Republican hero Governor Chris
Christie, simply refused to fork over the $3.1 billion due its pension plan
this year. Christie will worry about that tomorrow.
The conservative Reuters columnist James Pethokoukis has helpfully laid out
the Republican strategy. By refusing to bail out the states, local
governments will be forced to go the route of either Hamtramck or Prichard,
cutting services, pensions or both. Republicans may even pursue legislation
allowing states to declare bankruptcy and let the unions fight it out in the
courts. "From the Republican perspective," Pethokoukis explains, "the fiscal
crisis on the state level provides a golden opportunity to defund a key
Democratic interest group." Barack Obama, forgetting, once again, which side
elected him, chose to reinforce this right-wing narrative by
unilaterally-and unnecessarily-freezing the salaries of all federal workers.
Once again, it pains me to add, he elicited not a single conservative
concession in return. Obama, like so much of Washington, loves to see the
deal done and worry about the details later. But with a radical Republican
majority in power in the House, what America needs right now in the
White House, Mr. President, is a fighter, not a referee.
Eric Alterman
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