Obama: Shooting People “Evil … Senseless”

by Jay Janson / July 22nd, 2012

While reading the text of Obama Statement on Shootings in Colorado, one line struck this writer as quite astounding:

“We may never understand what leads anybody to terrorize their fellow human beings like this. Such violence, such evil is senseless. It’s beyond reason.”

The President may have realized afterward that since he has been ordering the shooting of thousands in a half-dozen countries, the words “evil, senseless, beyond reason” could easily reflect back on himself. A later Obama statement on the massacre in a Colorado movie house did not contain the words “evil,” “senseless,” “violence beyond reason.”

In any case, history books, in some future, probably not to distant, day will deplore Obama’s pathetic 9/11 excuse for increasing and extending a ten-year-old military occupation war in dirt poor Afghanistan, killing, and killing easily, young and old Afghani, who are fighting invaders of theirir nation as they have always done. And perhaps one day independent investigative journalism will reveal whose instructions Obama was following from within that “financial element” that FDR confided “has owned the government since the days of Andrew Jackson.”¹
 
Historians will denounce his shameful exceeding of his executive powers under the Constitution, to have assassinated even American citizens without trial, and ridicule the pack of lies he offered in sick defense of his frightening Hellfire and Predator drones murdering intentionally and collaterally while menacing all citizens in some of the most poverty-stricken populations on earth. Historians will judge his character by his once infamous joking about using a drone on his daughters boyfriends — “they’ll never know what hit them.”²

 
Very possibly, scholars will chronicle a time when Americans were no longer kept in ignorance by a commercial media blackout of the last year of Martin Luther King Jr.’s life, when King called his country “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world” and condemned US wars as all meant to maintain “unjust overseas predatory investments.”³ Such a time might well arrive in the racing era of instant world-wide personal communication while Barack Obama is still alive and prosecutable for crimes against humanity, or in his own words of 2012, “for violent, evil, senseless and beyond reason, terrorizing fellow human beings.” With the recording of his words, Obama would have difficulty pleading insanity.

1. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Wikiquote. [↩]
2. Obama Jokes About Killing Jonas Brothers With Predator Drones. [↩]
3. Listen or read: King’s April 1967 New York sermon: Beyond Vietnam – a Time to Break Silence click here;
   or see International Awareness Campaign, King Condemned US Wars. [↩]

Jay Janson, spent eight years as Assistant Conductor of the Vietnam Symphony Orchestra in Hanoi and also toured, including with Dan Tai-son, who practiced in a Hanoi bomb shelter. The orchestra was founded by Ho Chi Minh,and it plays most of its concerts in the Opera House, a diminutive copy of the Paris Opera. In 1945, our ally Ho, from a balcony overlooking the large square and flanked by an American Major and a British Colonel, declared Vietnam independent. Everyone in the orchestra lost family, "killed by the Americans" they would mention simply, with Buddhist un-accusing acceptance. Jay can be reached at: tdmedia2000@yahoo.com. Read other articles by Jay.

This article was posted on Sunday, July 22nd, 2012 at 6:59am and is filed under Obama, War Crimes.

How Liberals Win

Opinion

How Liberals Win

Bettmann/Corbis

President Franklin D. Roosevelt signing the National Recovery Act.

By BILL SCHER

Published: June 30, 2012

PRESIDENT OBAMA has endured much criticism of his legislative skills from his fellow progressives. His conciliatory approach has been compared unfavorably with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s gleeful pugnacity and Lyndon B. Johnson’s relentless arm-twisting. His willingness to strike deals with corporations has been tagged “business as usual.” Many progressives, frustrated over the past three years, have concluded that the political system is fundamentally broken because corporate power has been allowed to suffocate popular liberal policies.

But the Supreme Court’s upholding of Mr. Obama’s health care law reminds us that the president’s approach has achieved significant results. If his liberal critics paused to assess how he achieved such results, they would not see a system paralyzed by corporations; they would see that the most liberal reforms in more than 40 years have been brought about because Mr. Obama views corporate power as a force to bargain with, not an enemy to vanquish.

The necessity of corporate support for, or at least acquiescence to, liberal policies is not a new development in the history of American liberalism. Indeed it has been one of its hallmarks. 

Roosevelt may be remembered for his combativeness toward corporations; he famously said, “I welcome their hatred.” But he said that in 1936, only after key New Deal legislation had passed with the help of the United States Chamber of Commerce and the American Bankers Association. 

Early on, Roosevelt was quite adept at bargaining with corporations. In his first 100 days, to attract corporate support for the National Industrial Recovery Act, he won collective bargaining, minimum wages and maximum hours in exchange for a temporary suspension of antitrust law, so businesses could fix prices. To establish the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1934, he made concessions to Wall Street that scrapped statutory requirements in favor of regulatory flexibility. The following year, to allow the Federal Reserve to better conduct monetary policy, he gave bankers representation on the policy committee.

Johnson also found little value in warring with corporations. He won a Keynesian tax cut in early 1964, defeating budget-conscious conservatives, thanks to a broad coalition that included corporations. He attracted business support to back his first antipoverty bill by junking plans to promote family farming and push businesses to hire long-term unemployed people. He created the Transportation Department, in 1966, only after exempting resistant shipping interests from its jurisdiction. He incited a new era of environmental protection, increasing federal responsibility for cleaning air and water, while defusing corporate opposition by trading away federal pollution standards. 

Democratic presidents typically pay dearly when they choose to fight corporations instead of deal with them. Jimmy Carter sapped his political capital in the first two years of his presidency by trying to pass, with belligerent anticorporate rhetoric, a National Energy Act that would reduce our dependence on oil. He gave two major national addresses intended to rally the public and fend off critics’ attacks. At a town hall, he lashed out at oil companies for enjoying “a position of privilege in our country for too long” and having undue influence in Congress. But these confrontational tactics failed to rouse enough public ire to trump that influence, and Mr. Carter settled for a far smaller energy bill than he originally demanded. 

Or consider President Bill Clinton. In 1993, his health care task force largely resisted meeting with insurance lobbyists as it drafted legislation. In turn, the insurers didn’t wait for the legislation to be finalized before embarking on a vicious advertising campaign. When the first lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton, tried to belittle that effort, fund-raising for the insurance lobby skyrocketed and its advertising budget quintupled. Mr. Clinton, his bully pulpit diminished, couldn’t get Congress to vote on his bill. He suffered such a humiliating defeat that his ability to enact any other progressive reform was severely crippled. 

The realities of corporate power cannot be wished away by any president, no matter how tough the talk, because corporations can and will spend freely during the legislative process. And when they are unified, they have the resources to dominate debate. Even the progressive holy grail — a constitutional amendment banning corporate campaign donations — would not stop that.

BUT when corporations are divided or mollified, reformers can breathe. The president can be heard. Business owners can be convinced that they will remain profitable. The dim prospect of perpetual gridlock can be trumped by the allure of regulatory certainty. 

Just look at how Mr. Obama handled the health care law. Recently released e-mail exchanges between the White House and the pharmaceutical lobby, which detail a path of compromises that won the drug industry’s support for the Affordable Care Act, certainly look more like “business as usual” than “change.” The e-mails include a White House promise of a “direct line of communication” to lobbyists, along with a suggestion to “stay quiet” about an agreement that buried a proposal for cheap drug imports. 

But the e-mail trove is a case study in how liberal change becomes reality. The key to President Obama’s success was enlisting drug companies to pay for pro-reform advertisements. He also persuaded health insurers to forgo a major opposition campaign — by accepting the industry’s proposal for the individual mandate to buy private insurance and dropping plans for a competing public insurance option. As the final vote neared, the United States Chamber of Commerce and other organizations spent millions of dollars on advertisements attacking “Obamacare.” But the pharmaceutical industry effectively matched the chamber’s money in supportive advertisements, blunting the impact of the criticism. 

Health care was not an anomaly for Mr. Obama. His original stimulus package never faced well-financed conservative opposition in part because the United States Chamber of Commerce backed the business tax cuts in the package. We got a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau after Mr. Obama put Wall Street at ease by resisting proposals to cap the size of banks. New standards lifting average fuel-efficiency goals were set once the White House accepted the automakers’ demand for a review in 2021 and flexibility regarding light trucks. The food safety bill empowered the Food and Drug Administration to recall tainted items but won industry support by dropping a ban on bisphenol A, or BPA, a chemical used in food and beverage containers. 

The necessity of forging coalitions with corporations is understandably difficult for progressives to accept. Every time it happens, corporations seem to quickly go back to their usual tricks. They lobby to weaken enforcement. They litigate to have rules overturned. They abandon politicians who risked compromise for them. Corporations are exasperating, irritating and untrustworthy partners.

But most of the time politics is exasperating and irritating, not euphoric and cathartic. As Roosevelt himself told a group of dissatisfied youth activists in 1940, “if you ever sit here you will learn that you cannot, just by shouting from the housetops, get what you want all the time.” 

As much as Roosevelt enjoyed pugnacity, he also understood its limits. Because Mr. Obama heeded this lesson of liberal history, there was a health care law for the Supreme Court to uphold. 

Bill Scher is the executive editor of LiberalOasis.com and host of the LiberalOasis Radio Show podcast.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on July 1, 2012, on page SR8 of the New York edition with the headline: How Liberals Win.

July 6, 2012 at 16:07:50

Is Obama's Corporate-Friendly Approach Really "How Liberals Win"?

By Richard (RJ) Eskow (about the author)

 

Recently my friend and colleague Bill Scher challenged progressive critics of President Obama's conciliatory approach toward corporations with a New York Times op-ed entitled "How Liberals Win." Far from being "business as usual," Bill writes, "the Supreme Court's upholding of Mr. Obama's health-care law reminds us that the president's approach has achieved significant results."

Bill argues that, critics notwithstanding, ours is not "a system paralyzed by corporations." He adds: "The most liberal reforms in more than 40 years have been brought about because Mr. Obama views corporate power as a force to bargain with, not an enemy to vanquish."

Sorry, Bill. I'm with those who have concluded that the Obama White House has failed, both pragmatically and politically, on a number of key progressive issues. In my view, believing otherwise requires an almost a historical view of liberalism. We can't pre-emptively limit the definition of "liberal victory" to whatever corporate interests will allow.

Wherever the truth lies, the road ahead is clear: We can't allow the radical right to take power this year. But we need to fight for results, not politicians, by building a mobilized and truly independent citizens' movement.

Young and Estranged

This is an important discussion, especially in an election year in which liberals should be terrified. A Romney Presidency and increased Republican control on the Hill would endanger much they hold dear, including representative democracy, our social safety net, and workplace rights. And yet the outcome of this election may depend on the ability to mobilize precisely those voters who believe, not unreasonably, that the Obama Presidency represents "business as usual."

That may not be easy. Youth voters helped propel Obama into office and handed Democrats the House of Representatives. But youth turnout was lower in 2010 than in the previous off-year Congressional election of 2006, meaning they'd been more turned off in the preceding two years than they had been turned on by Obama.

To be sure, they still favor Obama over "generic" Republicans by a wide margin. But a poll which otherwise bodes well for Obama shows that young voters' enthusiasm has diminished considerably since 2008.

Why? Here are some clues: Another poll shows that three out of four young voters consider unemployment a "critical" issue. Obama's jobs messaging was ambiguous for years; at best, promoting jobs-destroying deficit panic as he "bargained" with corporations and their political representatives.

Three out of four young people also believe our economic system unfairly favors the wealthy, while a plurality of them feels their generation will never achieve the American Dream reached by those who came before. The President's rhetoric has improved on these issues in recent months -- but that's precisely because independent progressives and the Occupy movement refused to believe that dealmaking with corporations was a "win."

The Dispossessed

It's a similar story with middle-class voters who struggle with unemployment, stagnating wages and growing wealth inequity, retirement insecurity, lost home value, and tax laws which help the wealthy avoid paying their fair share. Who's speaking for liberals on the economy?

And let's be clear: By "liberals," what we really mean is "most Americans." Take Social Security and Medicare: Poll after poll has shown that most Americans oppose using their benefits to balance the budget. And yet, through his Simpson/Bowles Deficit Commission and on numerous occasions afterward, the President has opened the door to doing precisely that.

Most Americans want more government action on jobs, yet the President has offered only weak job proposals -- and tempered even those with tax cuts that muddy his own message and lave the public confused.

As our own analysis showed, more than 20 million voters live in underwater homes. There, too, the President's corporate-friendly agenda has limited his ability to connect with disaffected voters. These homeowners have been tormented and exploited by the Administration's own HAMP program, which is now better known by the name "extend and pretend."

Obama's Wall Street-friendly approach may be netting him a lot of banker contributions again this year, but a recent poll shows that independents in crucial swing states believe the President has mishandled the mortgage crisis and isn't holding Wall Street bankers "accountable" for their role in the housing crisis.

And when it comes to taxing the wealthy, the President has opted for the milquetoast Buffett rule (Is that the most Warren Buffett should be asked to chip in -- the same rate as his secretary?) rather than making the case for truly progressive taxation. On all of these key issues, the President's corporation-placating agenda has hamstrung his ability to connect with key voters the way he did in 2008.

Sure, the President's popular. But there's a difference between approval and votes. The difference is turnout.

Driving Turnout

There are two possible ways to get these voters to the polling booth: One is to convince them that the Obama Presidency has been a great liberal success. That's the approach taken by my friend Bill, undoubtedly because that's what he believes. Will that bring young voters, the unemployed, underwater homeowners, and other disenchanted citizens to the polls? That means convincing them that what looks like defeat -- burdensome debt, foreclosed homes, prolonged joblessness -- is really victory.

Good luck with that.

The other approach, which I believe is both more accurate and more effective, is to explain two very important things to them: that the GOP will cause enormous harm if it gains more political power, and that neither a President nor a party will fight for what's right -- or even what's popular -- without relentless pressure from independent and mobilized activists.

It didn't have to be this way. Had the President made different decisions, these voters could have been energized over the last three and a half years by hearing clear and forceful arguments in their favor. He could have used his bully pulpit to explain the extent of Wall Street's crimes and then used his Justice Department to investigate them. By viewing "corporate power as a force to be bargained with," Obama chose instead to sacrifice the principle of "one law for all." That alienated voters while leaving our economy at risk.

But what's done is done. That means there are two ways to get out the progressive vote in November: either to pretend that the Obama Presidency has been a victory for progressive values, or to build a movement that will fight for deeper change.

Winning?

The health-care bill which Bill touts as a liberal triumph is a perfect case in point. I don't envy Democratic leaders who must defend it against charges that it contains tax increases -- because it does. Some of those taxes, like the surcharge on high earners, would actually be quite popular if the President chose to explain it clearly. Others are un-progressive, unjust, and unwise -- and directly contradict the President's campaign promises.

The Right's "big lie" of the week is its claim that the health bill contains "the largest tax increase in history." It's not even close, and its biggest increase is for those who earn more than $200,000 per year. But middle-class families will take a hit when the law raises the limit for deductible medical expenses to 10 percent of adjusted earnings, up from its current 7.5 percent. Rule changes for health pending accounts will also increase the tax burden for some middle class families.

And they weren't all the result of compromises with corporate power, either. A case in point is the excise tax on higher-cost health plans, which is based on ivory-tower economics and will punish people economically for belonging to health plans whose demographic cost drivers they can't control. he President aggressively fought for the unpopular excise tax -- one of the few provisions he personally fought to include in the bill -- despite campaigning against it in 2008.

Public Option, Private Deals

Then there's the individual mandate, which will affect very few Americans but will nevertheless impose a financial penalty on middle-class and lower-income people. The President asked for trouble when he jettisoned the public option early on in secret negotiations with for-profit health providers.

The public option (a Medicare buy-in for people under 65) was popular across the political spectrum -- 51 percent of Republicans supported it, according to polling -- and it provided a ready answer for Americans (liberal and otherwise) who were outraged at the idea of being forced to buy a private insurance product that offers inadequate coverage and lousy services at exorbitant prices.

That answer? You can always choose the public option instead.

Instead the President cynically chose to keep backing the public option publicly, long after he'd traded it away privately. But he did so in a lackluster manner that quickly made it clear to some of us that he had made some sort of deal with someone, somewhere. He damaged both himself and liberalism with this approach, by undercutting his personal credibility while failing to champion progressive principles.

The Right Proposes, The Left Disposes

The most direct message Obama sent to Congress as health-care deliberations began was this one: "I am not the first President to take up this cause, but I am determined to be the last." To cynical parliamentarians that sounded very much like this: I'll sign pretty much any health care bill you send my way.

The way in which the President got his health-care bill passed -- which mostly involved letting conservative Democrats parlay with Republicans, then failing to win Republican votes anyway -- carried the seeds of troubles yet to come.
The end result was a bill whose key provisions were developed by the conservative American Enterprise Institute and enacted into law by Republican Governor Mitt Romney in Massachusetts.

Here's a question: Is it a liberal "win" if Democrats enact policies in 2010 that were first proposed by conservatives in 1993?

Medicare For Almost

Bill Scher points to legislative triumphs of the past, like Medicare under Lyndon Johnson, as proof that dealmaking with the powerful gets results. But Johnson never abandoned the rhetoric of liberalism, even when he sacrificed some of its goals in pursuit of the best achievable outcome. On far too many occasions Obama has abandoned that rhetoric.

The President has also treated progressives inside and outside his party with scorn that borders on contempt. "Sanctimonious," he called them, and "purists" who would be "without victories."

And yet, as some of us predicted at the time, a more "progressive" outcome would have been far more popular than the one he got. Obama's push for unpopular provisions like the excise tax wasn't politically expedient. It was the result of his own choices, by all the evidence, and not the product of political necessity. He owes the left an apology, and more attention to its advice, now that it has proved to be prescient on so many issues.

Obama's defenders defend the health-care bill's weaknesses by pointing to the improvements made to Medicare since it was initially passed. But could those improvements have taken place if LBJ had dismissed their importance during Medicare's initial passage?

There's no evidence that the President tried to win liberalism's battles before trading them away for the sake of expediency.There are many ways to lose a battle, but the most important one of all is this: First you must try to win it.

The Long View

Something else is missing from the "How Liberals Win" approach: a long view of liberalism. Obamacare's a textbook example, since it was first proposed as a conservative alternative to "Hillarycare" (itself a cumbersome compromise with corporations) in the early 1990s.

Yes, its passage was "historic" in several ways, at least one of which was ironic: Had Democrats agreed to support this conservative proposal in 1993, when Republicans like Warren Rudman were introducing it in the Senate, it would be approaching its 20-year anniversary.

That doesn't make it a bad bill or mean it's worse than nothing, but it illustrates something very important: While liberals focused on a narrow, short-term definition of "winning," conservatives took a longer view. As a result, conservatives have moved the national dialog radically rightward while liberals frantically shift their definition of "winning" accordingly. A "liberal win" is apparently now defined as the passage of a conservative proposal, as long as it's better than nothing and is signed into law by a Democratic President.

If this keeps up in a few years we'll be celebrating passage of the Romney/Ryan Medicare voucher plan as yet another "liberal win." Didn't America's seniors get something? And didn't a Democrat sign the bill?

The health-care bill does some good things, but it also contains many flaws and weaknesses. Bill Scher's engaging in faith-based reasoning, as anyone does when suggesting that the outcomes the President got were the best that anyone could have achieved. Like most professions of faith, that statement can neither be proved nor disproved.

But even if it's true (which we doubt), these outcomes could have -- and should have -- been accompanied by stronger rhetoric, by clearer defenses of the good things that were being sacrificed and a pledge to work for them again in the future. That didn't happen, and we're all paying the price.

Parallel Universes

On issue after issue, President Obama adopted positions that would have been considered center/right Republicanism in previous decades: Over-emphasizing the urgency and importance of deficit reduction. Willingness to cut Social Security benefits to balance the budget. Minimal or destructive action regarding underwater homeowners. Claiming that "Wall Street and Main Street rise and fall together" while failing to investigate criminal bank activity. (And this list doesn't include civil liberties issues, since the topic is economics.)

Would a more progressive Obama be in a stronger political position today? That gets into alternate-history scenarios that can never be proved or disproved. He might have met with more corporate resistance to his agenda -- although its hard to imagine much stronger resistance than we're seeing now, despite his many concessions -- and his donations from Wall Street and other large donors would have undoubtedly been smaller. That's not trivial in this post-Citizens United world, and we understand that.

On the other hand, a truly progressive President Obama would presumably be enjoying the enthusiastic backing of the core voters who propelled him to the Presidency in 2008. Would a more progressive economic agenda have been a net political advantage? We can't know.

But isn't it about time a Democrat tried it? Clinton's corporate-friendly agenda including the repeal of Glass-Steagall and the deregulation of Wall Street. Obama's corporate-friendly agenda left his party vulnerable to a GOP attack on the left over Medicare, wounded his party's brand as the defender of Social Security, and tainted him as too cozy with Wall Street. How's that workin' out?
And here's something we do know: The passage of better bills would have been better for the country.

The Way Forward

One thing is clear: Victory for liberalism cannot and must not be defined by the limits of what legislators can accomplish. Legislators operate within the realm of the politically possible, while independent movements change what's politically possible.

One of the President's greatest failures over the last three and a half years is that he chose to think like a legislator, not a leader. And one of liberalism's greatest failures was allowing so many people to identify with a leader, not with the principles and values that should be a movement's guiding star.

We can't change the past, but we can learn from it. We know that we need to think both short-term and long-term. We know now that electing persuadable politicians is the first step in the change process, not the last one. (Sure, re-elect them, as long as we can pressure them. But don't confuse tactics with strategies, compromises with goals, or politicians with ideals.)

Most of all, we know that we need a vigorous and truly independent movement -- one that will speak to disaffected voters like the adults they are, mobilizing them with honest talk about the limits of elected leaders, the power of a engaged citizenry, and the perils of outsourcing ultimate accountability to any politician or party.

That, and not attempting to put a positive gloss on inappropriate compromises, is the way forward. That's the right path, and the pragmatic path, for liberals to take -- this year, and in the years to come.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rj-eskow/the-dumbest-bipartisa

Host of 'The Breakdown,' Writer, and Senior Fellow, Campaign for America's Future 

 

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author
and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.

Obama’s disappearing liberal donors

SALON

Wednesday, Jun 13, 2012 12:15 PM EDT

Obama’s disappearing liberal donors

Not only has Wall St. shifted its support to Romney, but liberals have stopped giving to the president as well

By Andrew Leonard

 Topics: 2012 Elections, Barack Obama

 

 
President Obama (Credit: AP)

BuzzFeed tells us that the most liberal grass-roots supporters of Obama, the kind of small donors who eagerly donated 200 bucks to the senator from Illinois in 2008, aren’t ponying up the cash this year.

Maybe they should mull over the deeper meaning of the recent Politico headline: “Wall Street’s Vote: Romney by a Landslide.”

Financial sector donations to Romney and his super PAC currently total $37.1 million. To Obama — $4.8 million. A significant proportion of the cash is coming from moguls who supported Obama in 2008.

A sample:

Ken Griffin, founder of the Chicago-based hedge fund Citadel, has accused Obama of engaging in “class warfare” and gave $2,500 to Romney’s campaign, plus nearly $1.1 million to the pro-Romney super PAC Restore Our Future. But in 2008, Griffin donated the maximum $4,600 to Obama’s campaign and helped raise another $50,000 to $100,000.

Let’s get this straight. Obama continued George W. Bush’s bailout of the financial sector, has failed to prosecute any Wall Street executives for crimes related to the financial crisis, extended Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy, passed an extremely mild piece of bank reform legislation and let the banks get away with murder on the housing/foreclosure crisis. But he also said a few mean things about Wall Street fat cats, and he supports, in theory, higher taxes for the rich. CLASS WARFARE!

Liberal disappointment in Obama is easy to understand. He didn’t nationalize the banks; he didn’t push for a public option in healthcare; he authorizes drones to murder from the sky; et cetera. He has not transformed America as so many people apparently hoped he would. We can argue about how much he ever could have achieved, given the opposition of Republicans, but that’s all moot. He’s not inspiring the same level of excitement in 2012 as he did in 2008 and there are good reasons for that.

But still: Money talks. And apparently, any regulation is too much for Wall Street. And any suggestion of a more equitable distribution of wealth in the U.S. is verboten. If there’s any question about who Wall Street thinks would better serve its interests in the White House, the campaign finance numbers settle it, once and for all.

The New York Times reports that in May, Romney and his backers raised $76.8 million — $17 million more than Obama. Obama is getting especially clobbered in super PAC contributions : On Tuesday morning, the Wall Street Journal reported that casino magnate Sheldon Adelson contributed another $10 million to the Romney-affilated super Pac Restore Our Future.
The funding disparity, reports the Times, has pushed Obama to spend more time fundraising than any previous incumbent president, which has encouraged Republicans to make mean comments about how he should be concentrating on governing, rather than attending $40,000-a-plate star-studded dinners. Not only is this unkind, but it’s also deliciously perverse. Republican presidents appointed the Supreme Court justices who opened the floodgates for corporate cash to swamp the political process. Now they mock a Democratic president for spending far too much of his time begging for money — even as one of the key drivers of Obama’s desperation is the fact that most of that new corporate cash is going to the GOP’s candidate.
Wall Street’s candidate, Romney, can be counted on to appoint more Supreme Court justices dedicated to the proposition that government should not interfere with corporate influence over politics. Numbers don’t lie.

Andrew Leonard is a staff writer at Salon. On Twitter, @koxinga21.

Dems Paint Romney as “Outsourcer-In-Chief,” But Will Obama’s TPP Trade Deal Blow It?

Published on Sunday, July 1, 2012 by In These Times

Dems Paint Romney as “Outsourcer-In-Chief,” But Will Obama’s Trade Deal Blow It?

by Roger Bybee

 

The Obama administration and Democrats have been busily puncturing Mitt Romney’s record as an experienced “job creator,” with a multi-pronged attack on Romney’s role as a “pioneer” in offshoring jobs while heading up the private-equity fund Bain Capital


 

President Barack Obama speaks during a campaign event in New Hampshire on June 25, 2012. (Photo by Jewel Samad/Getty Images)

Backed up by an ever-mounting supply of evidence from the New York Times, Boston Globe, and the Washington Post, Obama and the Democrats have shredded Rommey's arguments that he is the man to restore employment.
Yet recent leaks reveal that the Obama administration has been secretly negotiating with Pacific Rim nations the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal, based on the job-destroying NAFTA model. Obama—as with his trade deals last year with South Korea, Panama, and human-rights pariah Colombia—is once more falling into line behind CEOs in promoting what he as a candidate fiercely denounced in 2008 as “trade deals like NAFTA and China [that] have been signed with plenty of protections for corporations and their profits, but none for our environment or our workers who've seen factories shut their doors and millions of jobs disappear.

Thus, the Obama administration’s efforts to pass the TPP muddle the partisan divide on the offshoring issue, which his campaign is now using so effectively against Romney. With 86% of Americans convinced that the offshoring of jobs contributes significantly to the nation’s economic problems, the 2012 election’s outcome may very well hang on the perception of Obama as the defender of the public interest on this issue.

Fortunately for Obama, Romney’s well-documented support for the offshoring of jobs has monopolized the media's attention, thanks to an effective Democratic and labor onslaught. New polling from NBC/The Wall Street Journal show significant gains for Obama in swing states, where a new ad campaign is being focused. A combination of front-page revelations about Bain Capital, powerful rhetoric from Obama (plus this video comparing Bain Capital to the Sopranos’ Mafia operation), skillfully crafted ads, and cleverly–timed legislation are keeping the spotlight on Romney.

As Tom Hamburger of The Washington Post reported:

Mitt Romney’s financial company, Bain Capital, invested in a series of firms that specialized in relocating jobs done by American workers to new facilities in low-wage countries like China and India. During the nearly 15 years that Romney was actively involved in running Bain, a private equity firm that he founded, it owned companies that were pioneers in the practice of shipping work from the United States to overseas call centers and factories making computer components, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

In New England on Monday, Obama mocked Romney’s efforts to distinguish between supposedly positive and negative forms of outsourcing and offshoring, thundering:

Gov. Romney's commitment to outsourcing is not just part of his record, it's part of his overall economic vision that he and Republicans in Congress want to implement if they win this election.
You don't need someone trying to explain to you the difference between outsourcing and offshoring. You need someone who's going to wake up every single day and fight for American jobs and investments here in the United States.

Meanwhile, a new TV ad, which Priorities USA Action plans to spend $10 million airing, features a worker named Mike Earnest who was employed at Bain-owned AMPAD in Marion, Indiana. Earnest recounts how he was assigned to building a stage, from which Bain officials announced that the once-profitable plant was closing:

Mitt Romney made over a $100 million dollars by shutting down our plant and devastated our lives. Turns out that when we built that stage it was like building my own coffin, and it just made me sick.

Labor and progressive Democrats are hoping to draw a stark contrast with Romney and the GOP by pushing for a vote shortly after the July 4 holiday on the Bring Jobs Home to America Act. The measure would withdraw tax incentives for relocating jobs overseas and extend tax credits to corporations bringing jobs back to U.S. plants. The proposal also coincides with Obama’s severely exaggerated touting of a trickle of returning jobs as a meaningful “trend” toward voluntary “insourcing” by U.S.-based firms like Master Lock.
Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisc.), the Democratic candidate for a vacant U.S. Senate seat, told a Milwaukee news conference last week, “We’ve been seeing manufacturing taking it on the chin for years. We’ve got to take away the perverse incentives to shift our industrial base overseas.”
In an interview with Working In These Times, Baldwin noted that many of the firms engaged in offshoring jobs are already paying little or no corporate taxes. But she argued that the bill could be a starting point that would build momentum toward a sweeping policy to rebuild America’s industrial base.
“This is not a substitute for a more comprehensive manufacturing policy, ” she stressed.
Moreover, the pro-labor Baldwin said that she had joined other members of Congress in signing a letter to U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk objecting to the Trans-Pacific Partnership’s provisions which would ban the use of “Buy American” regulations and strengthen corporate-run dispute-resolution panels over regulations democratically created by the U.S. Congress and state legislators. 
The TPP’s staunchest opponents characterize it as a "backroom trade deal for the 1%." While the working text of the TPP has been withheld—until the recent leaks—from representatives of labor, environmental, public-health and other organizations, top corporate officials have enjoyed privileged access. As Lori Wallach, director of Global Trade Watch, has observed:

[M]ore than 600 business representatives serving as official U.S. trade advisers have full access to an array of draft texts and an inside role in the process. The strategy is to squelch informed debate until a deal is signed and any alterations become difficult.

The TPP’s shroud of secrecy is triggering cries of protest both in Congress and at the grassroots level, with the Texas AFL-CIO particularly active. The combined weight of this opposition, if intensified, may be sufficient to derail the completion of negotiations and congressional approval this year.
If the TPP can be blocked, the protests will have performed an enormous service to Barack Obama. While Romney almost surely lacks the skills or desire to use the Trans-Pacific Partnership against Obama, his corporate backers have the financial and PR resources to launch a massive ad campaign against Obama’s support of the TPP, thereby discouraging potential Obama voters.
The electoral stakes around the offshoring issue are huge, as Jamelle Bouie argues at The American Prospect:

For Romney to win, he needs to consolidate a huge majority of the white vote. To paint Romney as an “outsourcer-in-chief” is to damage his credibility with the non-college-educated whites who will form the basis of a Romney victory in states like Ohio, Iowa, and Wisconsin.
After all, these are voters whose lives have been most affected by the outsourcing pioneered by Bain-owned companies and who have been hit hardest by the relentless profit-seeking of companies like Bain. If the Obama campaign can identify Mitt Romney with outsourcing, then they can blunt his appeal with these voters and keep him from breaking the threshold for white support—around 60 percent.

© 2012 In These Times

Roger Bybee is a Milwaukee-based freelance writer and progressive publicity consultant whose work has appeared in numerous national publications and websites, including Z magazine, Common Dreams, Dollars & Sense, Yes!, The Progressive, Multinational Monitor, The American Prospect and Foreign Policy in Focus.