Robert Reich - The lesson for Obama of Europe's failed austerity

So far, President Obama's election strategy can best be summed up as: "We're on the right track, my economic policies are working, we still have a long way to go, but stick with me and you'll be fine."

This won't be enough to win him the election. The US recovery is too anaemic, and the chance of an economic stall between now and election day far too high. Even now, Mitt Romney's empty "I'll do it better" refrain is attracting as many voters as Obama's "we're on the right track." Each is gathering 46% of voter support, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

Only 33% of the American public thinks the economy is improving, while 39% say they're still falling behind financially – an 11-point increase from 2008. Nearly two thirds are concerned about paying for housing, and 23% of Americans with mortgages say they're underwater. If the economy stalls, Romney's empty promise will look even better. And I'd put the odds of a stall at 50:50.

Europe's forced austerity is pushing the continent into recession. Spain is already in one, and much of the rest of Europe is on the way. Luckily, the United States hasn't yet fallen into the austerity trap – America's fiscal policy is still wisely expansionary – but it's not sufficient to overcome a pull-back by American consumers.

Because most Americans' real pay continues to drop, they're going deeper into debt and tapping into their savings. Inevitably, they'll have to cut their spending. Without sufficient government spending to make up the difference, total demand will shrink, causing employers to pare hiring. March's disappointing jobs report could mark the beginning.

Read More:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/apr/23/lesson-obama-europe-failed-austerity

Simon Kuper - Why CEOs shouldn’t run the world

Just before the US invaded Iraq in 2003, I was debating the matter over brunch with a friend who is a multimillionaire entrepreneur. “Of course we should invade,” he said. “The Middle East can’t get any worse, so if you change something, it’s bound to get better.” I don’t know what surprised me more: the weirdness of his argument or his certainty in expressing it. He was suffering from what I now know as the “CEO fallacy”: the belief that if you have run a successful company, you can run a country.

Mitt Romney’s campaign for president rests on the “CEO fallacy”. As Romney says, “Other people in this race have debated about the economy … but I’ve actually been in it.” However, the CEO fallacy is a fallacy. To quote Larry Summers, former adviser to Barack Obama, now professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School: “The idea that you can extrapolate from the one-business level to the national economy seems to me a profound confusion.

The CEO fallacy goes like this: successful business people ran tight ships and made money. We, the country, want to run a tight ship and make money. Business types know how, and so they should rule. That’s why early admirers of George W. Bush’s administration called it “the CEO presidency”. The UK’s government wouldn’t have let a professor of medieval literature review the oil sector, but it got John Browne, former head of BP, to review British higher education.

Read More:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/5329fd94-89b1-11e1-85af-00144feab49a.html#ixzz1sge0g9MR

Caroline Arnold - In a Real World of Real People Can True Human Values Prevail?

Republicans seem to have adopted the position that humans act always and only according to cold calculations of how to maximize their personal rewards and minimize their personal costs.

This economic theory, called Homo economicus, conceives of humans as maximizing individuals – knowledgeable, rational and selfish.  It postulates that each person desires only his own profit and pleasure, always knows enough to determine his own best interest, and always reasons or calculates his benefit before acting, and that these individual decisions account for all social and economic organization – both societies and markets.

Critics have pointed out that real people do a lot of things a true Homo economicus would never do. Homo economicus would reason that it is pointless to vote, except against policies or politicians who threaten his personal rights or private gain, would see no reason to return a lost wallet, would never leave tips, volunteer to help neighbors, or serve their nation in the armed forces.

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/04/22

War On Women Taking Its Toll On The GOP

A new poll of battleground states out yesterday underscores the political consequences of the GOP’s all-out war on women and their health care.

The poll’s key findings:

• Among all registered voters, the president leads Mitt Romney 51 percent to 42 percent after trailing Romney by 2 points in the same poll last month.
• Among women under 50, the president leads Romney by a more than 2:1 margin. Romney’s support among this group of women has dropped 14 points in the last month and is down to just 30 percent, while the president’s support has ticked by an even larger margin.

Read More:

http://www.opednews.com/populum/linkframe.php?linkid=148196

Dave LeFcourt - Lunacy Wrapped in the Mantle of Sanity

Didn't the cold war end with the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991?

Apparently not to Mitt Romney who just the other day referred to Russia as "our No.1 geopolitical foe". Hmm?

I guess some things just don't die or maybe Romney has been "Rip Van Winkle" like these past 20 odd years and didn't get the memo.

So Obama let slip a remark to Russian President Medvedev that was inadvertently picked up by an open mike that after the November elections he'd have more "flexibility" in considering Russian concerns about the U.S. missile defense system to be deployed in Eastern Europe. Obama was heard to say, "This is my last election. After my election I'll have more flexibility", to which Medvedev commented, "I'll pass that on to Vladimir", (Russia's new president taking office in May).

Of course the Republicans went ballistic over Obama's off hand remark regurgitating their old mantra that Obama and the Democrats would be "soft on defense".

Read More:

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Lunacy-Wrapped-in-the-Mant-by-Dave-Lefcourt-120329-952.html

Robert Scheer - Voters Have Two Candidates, No Choice

With Mitt Romney’s super-PAC limo now on cruise control to victory at the GOP convention, voters are left with only two reasons to vote against Barack Obama: Either they are desperate to return a white man to the White House or they feel strongly that it is time to break the glass ceiling denying Mormons the presidency.

Out of a sense of tolerance I could cotton to the latter—heck, why should the bizarre beliefs of Romney’s church be a deal breaker? I’m hoping for a strong Jewish contender someday and wouldn’t like her burdened with defending Old Testament claptrap.

The problem in this mind-numbing Republican primary season is that the campaign has exposed Romney as not just another white male Mormon like some of the fairly reasonable senators who have represented Utah. Or like Romney’s own father, George, at one time the governor of Michigan. No, this Romney is now widely regarded as the vulture capitalist he is, a politician who is a say-and-do-anything opportunist with no moral limits on his outsized ambitions.

Read More:

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/voters_have_two_candidates_no_choice_20120322/

Robert Reich - The Republican’s Social-Darwinist Budget Plan

In announcing the Republicans’ new budget and tax plan Tuesday, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan said “We are sharpening the contrast between the path that we’re proposing and the path of debt and decline the president has placed us upon.”

Ryan is right about sharpening the contrast. But the plan doesn’t do much to reduce the debt. Even by its own estimate the deficit would drop to $166 billion in 2018 and then begin growing again.

The real contrast is over what the plan does for the rich and what it does to everyone else. It reduces the top individual and corporate tax rates to 25 percent. This would give the wealthiest Americans an average tax cut of at least $150,000 a year.

The money would come out of programs for the elderly, lower-middle families, and the poor.

Seniors would get subsidies to buy private health insurance or Medicare – but the subsidies would be capped. So as medical costs increased, seniors would fall further and further behind.

Read More:

http://www.nationofchange.org/republican-s-social-darwinist-budget-plan-1332336007

Mike Feder - The New Republican Prayer

I always liked the 23rd psalm--though I'm not religious in the standard sense. The poetry and the feeling-- and the sense of fortitude and inspiration in the psalm has always moved me. But watching the hard-heartedness and love of money evinced by the Republican primary candidates (and their audiences), coupled with their shameful trumpeting of "Christian" values, I thought a little updating/revision might be in order...

Watch Here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Od_t2BRsh6c

Henry Giroux - Gated Intellectuals and Ignorance in Political Life: Toward a Borderless Pedagogy in the Occupy Movement

A group of right-wing extremists in the United States would have the American public believe it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of a market society. Comprising this group are the Republican Party extremists, religious fundamentalists such as Rick Santorum and a host of conservative anti-public foundations funded by billionaires such as the Koch brothers(1), whose pernicious influence fosters the political and cultural conditions for creating vast inequalities and massive human hardships throughout the globe. Their various messages converge in support of neoliberal capitalism and fortress mentality that increasingly drive the meaning of citizenship and social life. One consequence is that the principles of self-preservation and self-interest undermine, if not completely sabotage, political agency and democratic public life.

Neoliberalism or market fundamentalism as it is called in some quarters and its army of supporters cloak their interests in an appeal to "common sense," while doing everything possible to deny climate change, massive inequalities, a political system hijacked by big money and corporations, the militarization of everyday life and the corruption of civic culture by a consumerist and celebrity-driven advertising machine. The financial elite, the 1 percent and the hedge fund sharks have become the highest-paid social magicians in America. They perform social magic by making the structures and power relations of racism, inequality, homelessness, poverty and environmental degradation disappear. And in doing so, they employ deception by seizing upon a stripped-down language of choice, freedom, enterprise and self-reliance - all of which works to personalize responsibility, collapse social problems into private troubles and reconfigure the claims for social and economic justice on the part of workers, poor minorities of color, women and young people as a species of individual complaint. But this deceptive strategy does more. It also substitutes shared responsibilities for a culture of diminishment, punishment and cruelty. The social is now a site of combat, infused with a live-for-oneself mentality and a space where a responsibility toward others is now gleefully replaced by an ardent, narrow and inflexible responsibility only for oneself.

Read More:

http://www.truth-out.org/gated-intellectuals-and-ignorance-political-life/1332178712

Robert Reich - What Republicans Argue When They Have Nothing Left to Say

Republicans are desperate. They can’t attack Obama on jobs because the jobs picture is improving.

Their attack on the Administration’s rule requiring insurers to cover contraception has backfired, raising hackles even among many Republican women.

Their attack on Obama for raising gas prices has elicited scorn from economists of all persuasions who know oil prices are set in global markets and that demand in the United States has actually fallen.

Their presidential ambitions are being trampled in a furious fraternal war among Republican candidates.

Their Tea Party wing wants to reopen the budget deal forged with Democrats after Republicans got bloodied by threatening to block an increase in the debt limit.

Read More:

http://www.nationofchange.org/what-republicans-argue-when-they-have-nothing-left-say-1332257051