Obamanomics is the Escalation of Reaganomics

Obamanomics: Escalation of Reaganomics

By ISMAEL HOSSEIN-ZADEH




Global Research, January 31, 2011

President Reagan did not make any bones about his intention to reverse the New Deal economics when he set out to promote the Neoliberal economics. Likewise, President George W. Bush did not conceal his agenda of aggressive, unilateral militarism abroad and curtailment of civil liberties at home.

There is a major similarity and a key difference between these two presidents, on the one hand, and President Obama, on the other. The similarity lies in the fact that, like his predecessor, President Obama faithfully, and indeed vigorously, carries out both the Neoliberal and militaristic policies he inherited. The difference is that while Reagan and Bush were, more or less, truthful to their constituents, President Obama is not: while catering to the powerful interests vested in finance and military capitals, he pretends to be an agent of “change” and a source of “hope” for the masses.

There has been a wide-ranging consensus that the excessive financial/economic deregulations that started in the late 1970s and early 1980s played a critical role in both the financial bubble that imploded in 2007-2008 and the continuing persistence of the chronic recession, especially in the labor and housing markets.

Prior to his recent U-turn on the regulation-deregulation issue, President Obama shared this near unanimous view of the destructive role of the excessive deregulation of the past several decades and, indeed, strongly supported the need to bolster regulation: "It's time to get serious about regulatory oversight," Mr. Obama argued as the Democratic nominee for President; and again, “…this crisis has reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control,” as he stated in his inaugural speech.

Expressions of such pro-regulation sentiments were part of his earlier promises of “hope” and “change” in a new direction. Back then, that is, before showing his Neoliberal hand, the majority of the American people believed him—the middle, lower-middle, poor and working people who were tired of three decades of steady losses of economic security were desperately willing to believe a charismatic leader who peddled hope and change in their favor.

Recently, however, the president seems to have had a change of heart, or perhaps an epiphany, regarding the regulation-deregulation debate: he now argues that protracted recession and persistent high levels of unemployment are not due to excessive deregulation but to overregulation! Accordingly, he issued an executive order on 18 January 2011 that requires a comprehensive review of all existing government regulations. On the same day, the president wrote an op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal in which he argued that the executive order was necessary in order “to remove outdated regulations that stifle job creation and make our economy less competitive.” The president further argued that “Sometimes, those [regulatory] rules have gotten out of balance, placing unreasonable burdens on business—burdens that have stifled innovation and have had a chilling effect on growth and jobs. . . . As the executive order I am signing makes clear, we are seeking more affordable, less intrusive means to achieve the same ends—giving careful consideration to benefits and costs.”

Stripped from its Orwellian language, this “cost-benefit” approach to health, safety and environmental standards is clearly the familiar Neoliberal rhetoric that is designed to help big business and their lobbies that have been working feverishly to stifle the widespread pro-regulation voices that have grown louder since the 2007-08 financial melt-down.

Indeed, the president’s recent agenda of further deregulation has already born fruits for big business. The Wall Street Journal reported on 20 January 2011:

“A day after President Barack Obama ordered the government to get rid of burdensome rules, two federal agencies backed down from proposals that had drawn jeers from businesses. . . . The Labor Department said it was withdrawing a proposal on noise in the workplace that could have forced manufacturers to install noise-reducing equipment. And the Food and Drug Administration retreated from plans to tighten rules on medical-device approvals, postponing a proposal that would have given the FDA power to order additional post-market studies of devices. . . . Industry leaders praised the moves, while consumer advocates expressed disappointment. . . . ‘This is a very positive step forward,’ said Bill Hawkins, chief executive of medical-devices heavyweight Medtronic Inc.”

How is the president’s sharp turnaround on the regulation-deregulation debate to be explained? What “outdated deregulation” is he talking about? How could deregulation, which is widely believed to have been the problem, also be the solution? Why this sudden U-turn?

The change in the president’s view from the need for regulation to that of further deregulation can be explained on a number of planes.

On a narrow, personal and (perhaps) simplistic level, it can be argued that the president’s about-face on the issue of deregulation should not really be surprising; the turnaround represents quintessential Obama: spineless and/or unscrupulous, if you are a critic of the president; pragmatic and/or complex, if you are an apologist or defender of him.

There are also, of course, re-election considerations here. And here it seems that the president’s team is pinning his chances for re-election on big business and big media; confident that once he is able to win their hearts and minds, they will, in turn, be able to manipulate the public to vote for him—just as they did in the 2008 election.

On a deeper (but still personal) level, that is, on a philosophical or ideological level, it can be argued that the president has always been a Neoliberal thinker, albeit a stealth Neoliberal, who is coming out of the closet, so to speak, carefully and gradually. Evidence of his being ideologically more a partisan of Neoliberal than New Deal economics is overwhelming (see, for example, Pam Martin and Alan Nasser).

It is necessary to point out that although the stealth Neoliberal president has been taking baby steps out of the closet, he would always stay by the entrance: as long as there is no popular anger or pressure against his Neoliberal policies, he would stay on the outside; at the first signs of a threatening pressure from the grassroots, however, he would crawl back inside the closet, and begin preaching populism or uttering ineffectual, benign corporate-bashing rhetoric. This is his mission and his political forte – a master demagogue. And this is why the politico-economic establishment promoted him to presidency as they found him the most serviceable presidential candidate. None of his presidential rivals could have served the tycoons of the finance world and the kings of Wall Street as well as he has.

On a more fundamental level, President Obama’s reversal of his view from the need for rigorous regulation to the need for further deregulation, and his economic policies in general, show that while the politics and personalities of a president ought not be ignored, presidential economic policies cannot be explained by purely personality issues such as a failure of nerve, conviction, or ideas. The more crucial determinants of national economic policies are often submerged: the balance of social forces and the dominant economic interests that shape such policies from behind the scene. Stabilization, restructuring or regulatory policies are often subtle products of the outcome of the class struggle.

Thus, when the balance of social forces is tilted in favor of the rich and powerful, crisis-management economic policies would be crafted at the expense of the working people and other grassroots. In other words, as long as the costly consequences of the brutal Neoliberal restructuring policies (in terms of job losses, economic insecurity, and environmental degradation) are tolerated, business and government leaders, Republican or Democrat, would not hesitate to put into effect draconian measures to restore conditions of capitalist profitability at the expense of the impoverishment of the public.

On the other hand, when crisis periods give rise to severe resistance from the people to cuts in social spending, such crisis-management policy measures could also benefit the public. A comparison/contrast of policy responses to major economic crises in the United States clearly supports this point. Economic historians have identified four major economic crises in the past 150 years or so: The First Great Depression (1873-97), The Second Great Depression (1929-37), the long recession of 1973-83 (also known as the stagflation of the 1970s), and the current long recession that started in 2007-08.

Since there was no compelling grassroots pressure in response to either the First Great Depression of 1873-97 or the long recession of the 1970s, crisis management policies in both instances were decisively of the Neoliberal, supply-side type: suppression of trade unions and curtailment of wages and benefits; promotion of mergers, concentrated industries and big business; extensive deregulations and generous corporate welfare plans; in short, huge transfers of income from labor to capital. Likewise, a glaring lack of grassroots resistance in the face of the current long recession has allowed the ruling kleptocracy (both in the US and beyond) to adopt similarly brutal austerity policies that are gradually reviving financial/corporate profitability at the expense of the poor and working people.

By contrast, in response to the Great Depression of the 1930s workers and other popular forces achieved employment and income security as a result of a sustained pressure from "below."

The contrast between these two entirely different types of restructuring strategies shows that, as Mark Vorpahl, a union steward, recently put it, “Working people and the unemployed cannot rely on the politicians to get the change we need. We can only rely on our own collective strength. That is, we need to organize and mobilize as a united, massive, powerful force that cannot be ignored by those more intent to do Wall Street's bidding.” Only the threat of revolution can force people-friendly reform on the ruling kleptocracy.

Ismael Hossein-zadeh, author of The Political Economy of U.S. Militarism (Palgrave-Macmillan 2007), teaches economics at Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa.

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Ismael Hossein-Zadeh

THE HUFFINGTON POST

David Bromwich

Professor of Literature at Yale

Posted: January 29, 2011 09:30 AM

Obama, Incorporated

Barack Obama's 2011 State of the Union address was an organized sprawl of good intentions -- a mostly fact-free summons to a new era of striving and achievement, and a solemn cheer to raise our spirits as we try to get there. And it did not fail to celebrate the American Dream.

In short, it resembled most State of the Union addresses since Ronald Reagan's first in 1982. Perhaps its most notable feature was an omission. With applause lines given to shunning the very idea of government spending, and a gratuitous promise to extend a freeze on domestic spending from three years to five, there was only the briefest mention of the American war in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The situation in each country was summarized and dismissed in three sentences, and the sentences took misleading care to name only enemies with familiar names: the Taliban, al-Qaeda. But these wars, too, cost money, and as surely as the lost jobs in de-industrialized cities they carry a cost in human suffering.

The president also omitted to mention gun control: a reform that has been in the minds of most Americans since the Tucson killings. He had elected not to mention gun control in his speech in Tucson, either. Two traits we may now judge to be conspicuous in this president, in fair weather and foul, no matter what the pressure of the occasion. He rarely explains complex matters with a complexity equal to the subject matter; and he hates to be a bearer of bad news. The appreciative words he lavished on the big corporations in November, December, and January, and his appointment of William Daley of Morgan Chase as chief of staff and Jeffrey Immelt of General Electric as chairman of his White House jobs council, also indicate a larger personal tendency. When things are not going his way, Barack Obama tacks the other way farther and faster than most people would. In the process, he speaks words which sound like statements of newfound principles, for which he will not be answerable when the winds shift again.

At a surprising number of his public appearances, Obama has presented himself as something other than the chief executive of a republic. In Tucson, he spoke to a packed auditorium as a grief counselor, with the heart, purpose, and uplift familiar to the role. He began his State of the Union speech by recalling that occasion and the apparent return of national fellow-feeling it aroused. "Each of us is a part of something greater -- something more consequential than party or political preference. We are part of the American family." This metaphor, the nation-as-family, was deployed by Mario Cuomo in his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention of 1984: the greatest speech by a Democrat of the past 30 years.

But the idea of a political entity as a family has limits enforced by suitability. It is something more properly said by a politician affirming the value of the welfare state, as Cuomo did in 1984, than by a national leader pledged to be open-minded about cuts in entitlements.

The 2011 State of the Union was Obama's first rhetorical step to seal his new reputation as an anti-government Democrat. It has been said that, facing a determined and hostile Congress, Obama had no choice but to placate and again extol the virtues of bipartisanship. Certainly this was not a moment when he could pretend to speak for liberal reforms. What is surprising is the warmth with which he has embraced the premises of his opponents: in matters affecting public life and the economy, government is now said to be the problem, and private enterprise the solution; and far from deregulation having been a major cause of the financial collapse, the way to a healthy economy now lies through further deregulation. This rhetorical concession, adopted as a tactic, will turn against Obama as a strategy. The enormous budget cuts, for example, which he volunteered to make yet steeper will work against the ventures in job-creation which he has asked for without giving particulars.

Every advance that he makes on these lines as a gain to himself is a loss to his party. For without the idea that government is the heart of constitutional democracy and not a useless appendage, there is nothing much for Democrats to be; just as, without the idea that big business is the preserver of the American Dream and taxation is the enemy, there is nothing for Republicans to be. By offering himself as the rational corporate alternative to the Tea Party, Obama is taking a tremendous gamble, but with his party's fortunes more than his own. If the 2012 election were held tomorrow, both houses of Congress would pass into Republican hands and Obama would stay on as president. Not a word of his State of the Union address was calculated to alter that asymmetry.

Obama now speaks in strings of sentences like these: "The stock market has come roaring back. Corporate profits are up. The economy is growing again." The stock market, it would seem, plus corporate profits equals the economy: an odd equation to hear from a Democrat. Bill Clinton in 1995 is Obama's only precursor on this terrain, but even Clinton would quickly have added that corporate profits are not the measure of all good. By contrast, Obama is now convinced that there is no advantage in putting in qualifications except as a formality. He did acknowledge that "we have never measured progress by these yardsticks alone" and that the "success of our people" depends on "the jobs they can find and the quality of life these jobs offer." But he declined to offer a government commitment to helping the jobless, or underemployed, apart from tax cuts for working Americans.

Again, he did ask that the Bush tax cuts for the rich be allowed to expire in 2012. But it was President Obama who pushed his party to surrender their expiration at the end of 2010; in 2012, with the demands of an election close, how many Democrats will take the risk Obama himself feared to take in 2010? On immigration, another issue of the mid-term election in which Obama's liberal position was unpopular, he has gently instructed Congress to conduct a polite debate and try to be decent to honest and hard-working immigrants. He did say children of immigrants, including illegals, hard-working or not, should have equal access to education without "the threat of deportation." And he suggested that foreigners who came here to get advanced degrees should be allowed to stay. But he made no mention of the DREAM Act, or any specific policy that would achieve such goals.

What is hard to take in at a glance is the extent of the change in the political description Obama has dedicated himself to earning over the next two years. All his general pledges now bear the stamp of the corporate ideology. This ideology assumes that the energy, initiative, and technical knowhow that contribute to our society the objects and experiences most valued by Americans originate in the private sector and are generally stunted, impaired, adulterated, or degraded by public supervision. The favor shown to charter schools by the president and his secretary of education Arne Duncan, in their endorsement of the testing regime of Race to the Top, draws on that ideology without much skepticism; and as Diane Ravitch has shown, it has encouraged a broad disdain for the supposed lack of "results" in public education that is not supported by facts.

Obama's model for sentiment, far more than Clinton, has now become Ronald Reagan. His manner in his first two years was burdensome, grave and oratorical; but in town halls and talk shows, he was experimenting with a different style; this was given a formal trial in Tucson and it became official in the State of the Union. Obama has copied the manners, the speech inflections, the kinetic rise and fall of the voice of TV talk show hosts, with as much application as Reagan brought to the study of 1930's radio announcers and the faces of the talkie stars who came before him. But there is a dimension beyond style in the choice of Reagan as a model for tone and surface. As Reagan, to clinch the Republican hold on the South, made common cause with racists -- a step his predecessors had refused to take -- so Obama, to move Wall Street reliably into the Democratic column, will be tempted to weaken or destroy unions, to dissociate himself from peace activists and defenders of civil liberties, and to lose what he can afford to lose of the base that brought him to power. (There were hints of this as early as August, in Robert Gibbs's comment that Obama's left-wing critics "ought to be drug tested.")

Like Reagan, Obama now cultivates a style of deliberate platitude. "Sustaining the American Dream has never been about standing pat. It has required each generation to sacrifice, and struggle, and meet the demands of a new age." There are times when the strenuous blandness passes finally into a vacuity of non-meaning: "We can't win the future with a government of the past." What is a government of the past? And what could it mean to win the future?

Obama wants to win, but he would also like nobody to lose, and he has coined some words to express his difference from the more agonistic proponents of American supremacy. We can, he said in his State of the Union, "out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world." How will we do that? By "free enterprise" in the private sector and by cuts -- "taking responsibility for our deficit" -- in government. "My administration will develop a proposal to merge, consolidate, and reorganize the federal government in a way that best serves the goal of a more competitive America." Such a vow to move things around goes easily with promises that supply in grandeur what they lack in proximity: "By 2035, 80 percent of America's electricity will come from clean energy sources." All the producers and all the consumers can be happy together: "Some folks want wind and solar. Others want nuclear, clean coal, and natural gas. To meet this goal, we will need them all." All those folks, and all their energies. But at what time, in what place, was the central problem of nuclear energy solved: where to dump the radioactive waste that is lethal for thousands of years?

A main inference from the State of the Union is that in 2011 and 2012, the president will not initiate. He will broker. Every policy recommendation will be supported and, so far as possible, clinched by the testimony of a panel of experts. There were signs of this pattern in the group of former secretaries of state, including Henry Kissinger and Colin Powell, whom the president brought in to endorse the START nuclear pact; in the generals who were called on to solidify support for the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell; and in Bill Clinton holding a presidential press briefing on the economy. Obama, on such occasions, serves as host and introducer; he leaves the podium to the experts. The idea is to overwhelm us with expertise. In this way, a president may lighten the burden of decision and control by easing the job of persuasion into other hands. Obama seems to believe that the result of being seen in that attitude will do nothing but good for his stature.

What sort of occasions, then, will keep him in public view? Town hall meetings. Talk shows. One-on-one interviews with unthreatening reporters such as John Harwood and Katie Couric. Though Obama is said to resent journalists, he has been able to rely on the mainstream media as a partner throughout his career. The corporate sponsors will stand behind the presenters now more plainly than before. He is hoping, with this kind of backing, to offer an educational answer to the superstitions and anxieties of the Tea Party: above all, their apprehension that they are losing "the America we grew up in." It remains a disturbing evasion in his presidency that Obama has hardly recognized the Tea Party's existence, and has never attempted to answer its members -- not even where they are most deeply and harmfully mistaken, as in the belief they have taken up that global warming is a "hoax." He prefers to keep the political contest a face-off between his own abstract legitimacy and a nameless and inscrutable heterodoxy.

There was one moment in this speech that should have startled every listener; except that, coming from Barack Obama, the aberration may have appeared normal. In 2010, he persuaded a Democratic congress to pass a health care law that is now accounted by many to be his largest single achievement. Obama has praised himself in no uncertain terms for the exertions he made to get the legislation passed. That the law is still in peril is largely owing to his wrong supposition that, once the measure was passed, the argument was over. Obama left the law to speak for itself. He underestimated the complexity of the process of legitimation and the work of patient explanation that would be required of him. The astounding detail of his State of the Union speech was therefore Obama's announcement that the health care law is again negotiable. While he cannot imagine allowing insurance companies to deny coverage because of a pre-existing condition, he would, he said, accept any changes that seem good to him. He was choosing to treat a law that is now on the books as a mere statement of preference.

Where all is so pliable before, during, and after the passage of a law, what need have we of laws themselves? But here it was: in the same way that he offered a five-year domestic spending freeze without any immediate pressure to do so, Obama welcomed an indefinite revision of health care before being shown a single amendment. "Let me be the first to say that anything can be improved. If you have ideas about how to improve this law by making care better or more affordable, I am eager to work with you."

All laws are subject to modification, of course, but this is the first time in memory that a president has put his own law on the auction block and said he was ready to bargain it down. The obvious conclusion is forced on us. Barack Obama, starting in 2002 -- the year he declared at a Chicago rally his opposition to the coming war against Iraq -- had a keen eye on his political rise, but he had slender experience and a narrow focus disguised by inspirational special effects. In earlier years, he was protected by the Chicago Democratic machine; after 2004, he was shepherded by leaders of the Democratic party who disliked the Clintons or feared that Hillary Clinton could never win a presidential election. His apparent convictions -- on the environment, on the Middle East, on nuclear proliferation: matters of more concern to him than health care -- were resonant and sincere but they had never been brought to a test. It turned out that few of his convictions were as strong as Obama thought they were.

"We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America," said Barack Obama shortly before the 2008 election. "I am absolutely certain," he had said in St. Paul when he clinched the Democratic nomination, "that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on earth."

In retrospect, that messianic fervor is shocking. Today no one can easily say who Barack Obama is or what he stands for; and the coming year is unlikely to offer many clues, since all the thoughts of Obama in 2011 appear to concern Obama in 2012. The best one can do is to point out that the words of his State of the Union address seem uttered by a different person and spoken in another language: "We're the nation that put cars in driveways and computers in offices; the nation of Edison and the Wright brothers; of Google and Facebook. In America, innovation doesn't just change our lives. It is how we make our living. (Applause.)"

This post originally appeared on the New York Review of Books blog.

THE HUFFINGTON POST

Marcus Baram

Obama Administration Cut Funding To Promote Democracy In Egypt, Disappointing Human Rights Activists

First Posted: 01/28/11 10:00 PM Updated: 01/29/11 02:00 AM

NEW YORK -- President Obama's historic speech at Cairo University galvanized millions of people across the Arab world with its inspiring message of peace and brotherhood among Muslims. And his stirring endorsement of democracy gave hope to many Egyptians that his words would ring in a new era, helping pressure their own government to hold free and fair elections and to adhere to the rule of law.

But when it comes to backing up the president's rhetoric since that speech in June 2009, the administration has a decidedly mixed record and has disappointed many Egyptians, foreign policy experts tell The Huffington Post. Though Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has championed human rights around the world and American diplomats have quietly encouraged political and legal reforms in Egypt, when it comes to promoting democracy in the riot-torn country, efforts have generally been less aggressive than the Bush administration's. On Friday, amidst violent protests, longtime leader Hosni Mubarak announced the resignation of Egypt's government.

In its first year, the Obama administration cut funding for democracy and governance programming in Egypt by more than half, from $50 million in 2008 to $20 million in 2009 (Congress later appropriated another $5 million). The level of funding for civil society programs and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) was cut disproportionately, from $32 million to only $7 million. Though funding levels for 2010 are not yet available, they are expected to show an increase to $14 million, says Stephen McInerny, the director of advocacy at the Project on Middle East Democracy. He notes that the Bush administration slashed economic aid to Egypt in the 2009 budget but kept the funding for democracy and governance programs constant, while Obama cut funding to those programs in an effort to make the cuts more proportional and under pressure from the American embassy in Cairo.

The White House and the State Department did not return emails for comment.

In addition, the administration limited funding only to NGOs registered with the Egyptian government, oversees such groups broadly and can dissolve them for violations like receiving foreign funding. Most human rights groups are not registered with the government, according to an Egyptian academic interviewed by the U.S. Embassy. The widely-criticized change,
taken in the wake of intense pressure from Egyptian officials for the U.S. to stop funding non-registered groups, reversed a Bush-era policy of funding all NGOs and civil society programs.

"The speech in Cairo raised expectations a lot that a new era was near with sustained support for human rights and dignity" said Bruce K. Rutherford, the author of "Egypt After Mubarak: Liberalism, Islam and Democracy." "The administration chose not to follow through on that
for a variety of reasons, cutting the support for civil society programs in half, etc. There was the perception that he did the opposite of what he said he would do and there is anger and
disillusionment at the U.S. and Obama in general among almost everyone I talk to in Egypt."

The new administration limited funding to human rights groups in an effort to repair its relationship with the Egyptian government, which was damaged during the Bush years, says McInerny. "There was a real priority to improve relations in the area after the tumult of the
previous eight years."

Former U.S. Ambassador to Egypt Nicholas Veliotes agreed with that assessment, noting that the failure of Bush's public pressure campaign was most evident in a State of the Union speech during which the former president explicitly called out Mubarak. "That backfired completely -- the only thing that Mubarak could do under those circumstances was to hunker down. If he did cave and do the right thing, he'd be accused of doing it for the wrong reasons," he said.

But the new administration started off on the wrong foot, says McInerny. "One of the big mistakes was adopting this policy of USAID (U.S. Agency for International Development) funding only going to organizations that were registered," he says. "Privately, the administration realizes that but they still have that policy." McInerny feels that the administration improved its policy on such issues in its second year. "They sent some really bad signals the first year and since then they've realized their mistakes and are doing a much better job on civil society issues."

The administration emphasized establishing warmer ties with Egypt to avoid the public "name and shame" tactics of Bush, while urging political reforms in private, according to diplomatic cables posted by WikiLeaks on Friday.

American efforts to promote democracy are viewed skeptically by Mubarak, the U.S. Embassy in Cairol told Clinton in a cable shortly before the Egyptian leader's visit to Washington in May 2009.

"We have heard him lament the results of earlier U.S. efforts to encourage reform in the Islamic world," says the cable. "He can harken back to the Shah of Iran: the U.S. encouraged him to accept reforms, only to watch the country fall into the hands of revolutionary religious extremists. Wherever he has seen these U.S. efforts, he can point to the chaos and loss of stability that ensued."

Former diplomats contacted by Huffington Post felt that the current administration is doing its best under difficult circumstances. They noted that Egypt is of vital importance and has been instrumental as a U.S. ally in the region on Israel-Palestinian issues, the Iraq War and
containing Iranian ambitions. "It is the largest culturally important Arab country and our number one political ally in the region," said David Mack, the former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs from 1990 to 1993. "Egyptians have always been there and they are essential to US strategic concerns -- you deal with reality and you don't necessarily have the choice of who it is that you're talking to."

As for democracy and human rights, Mack says it's a matter of tactics, since the American position has always been clear. "Bush was very public in his human rights agenda, and he embraced this with regard to Egypt, and I don't fault Obama for trying to deal with this differently," he said. Calling it a difficult balance between regional stability and promoting democracy, Mack criticized those "who say we have to be absolutely consistent from country to country -- as they say, consistency is the hobgoblin of inferior minds."

The State Department's mission is not just the promotion of human rights but in protecting American interests, says Veliotes. "One of which is democracy, but that is by no means the only one -- they're also concerned about regional stability." Veliotes emphasizes that the current turmoil in Egypt is a complicated situation, recalling that when he served as ambassador from 1983 to 1986, Mubarak represented a hopeful future, holding free parliamentary elections and freeing many prisoners (one of whom, Muslim Brotherhood leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, went on to become the number-two in al-Qaeda). At the time, he says Mubarak told him that he only wanted to serve two terms. "Obviously things have changed a lot but you can't push too hard or you'll just piss them off. I happen to believe that Clinton and Obama are handling this as well as they can."

Egyptian-American Aladdin Elaasar, who says he has not been able to contact his sister in Cairo in recent days due to phone outages and the government's Internet shutdown, was much more critical of the White House for failing to "see the writing on the wall."

The author of "The Last Pharaoh: Mubarak and the Uncertain Future of Egypt in the Obama Age," Elaasar says that Obama's policy on the country is worse than Bush's. "At least Bush talked about the whole Middle East, winning hearts and minds. When Obama came and chose to deliver that speech in Cairo, that was great, but it sent a mixed message. They saw him shaking hands with Mubarak -- he talked about democracy and all that, but nothing has happened," he said, pointing out the country's huge youth population that remains alienated and often unemployed.

The cables also reveal new details about Egypt's judicial system and their government's defensiveness when questioned by American diplomats. When an embassy staffer asked top Egyptian security official General Abdel Rahman about police brutality and prison conditions, Rahman asserted that the Interior Ministry State Security (SSIS) "has not abused prisoners 'in the past ten years' and claimed "there are no problems with prison conditions."

Elsewhere, the cables upend that claim with widespread citations of abuse, including police officers assaulting and sodomizing prisoners. One of the cables describes the arrest of a government clerk for writing poetry that insulted Mubarak -- he was sentenced to three years in prison. One human rights activist said "unrelenting pressure" on police officers led to a climate where "to conduct murder investigations, police will round up 40 to 50 suspects from a neighborhood and hang them by their arms from the ceiling for weeks until someone confesses."

Often, Egyptian officials mocked U.S. pressure on human rights. Rahman complained that "communists and extremists" dominated the NGOs and human rights organizations. One ministry official "wondered whether the U.S. was under 'external pressure' to be more 'hawkish' on human rights in Egypt or whether the U.S. intervention was 'retribution' for U.S.-Egyptian differences over procedure" during the Israeli peace process, according to a cable sent in February 2009.

In meetings with Egyptian security officials in early 2009, Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Labor Michael Posner "stressed that U.S. human rights policy is based on principled engagement, universal standards and a recognition that reform will come from internal actors." To demonstrate the new administration's commitment to human rights, Posner cited President Obama's announcement "on his second day in office to close Guantanamo."

Obama’s Chokehold on Left Antiwar Activists. The Disillusioned Vacillate

Obama’s Chokehold on Left Antiwar Activists

The Disillusioned Vacillate

by John V. Walsh / January 28th, 2011

An anti-Obama manifesto of sorts, in the form of a petition, was issued this week, signed by over 150 Left antiwar activists. As I read the first paragraph, eager to sign, my hopes were quickly dashed. It reads:

We the undersigned share with nearly two-thirds of our fellow Americans the conviction that our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq should be ended and that overall military spending should be dramatically reduced. This has been our position for years and will continue to be, and we take it seriously.

So far, so good, even admirable – although some of the signers backed Obama even as he promised more war in 2008. But perhaps disillusionment had finally taken hold. So what is to be done, according to the petitioners? That comes in the next sentence.

We vow not to support President Barack Obama for renomination (emphasis, j.w.) for another term in office, and to actively seek to impede his war policies unless and until he reverses them.

“Renomination”? Many of these very people were calling for George W. Bush’s impeachment for doing what Obama is doing now, although Obama is doing more of it, as the rest of the petition makes clear.

“Renomination”? Does anyone think that the Democratic Party machine will deny Obama the nomination in 2012? And is there even the faintest suggestion here that the petitioners will try to field another candidate, a genuine peace candidate?

“Renomination”? Does that mean that the signatories will vote for Obama once he has been nominated out of fear of the Republican “fascists,” as the Republican opposition, not much different from Obama himself, is so often and so glibly labeled.

As we all know, politicians in general and Obama in particular care not one whit about petitions such as these. They care only about a threat to being elected or re-elected. The time for begging or petitioning Obama to change is long since past. It is time to organize an alternative. If a serious challenge to Obama and indeed to both War Parties is to be mounted, it must begin soon. Unfortunately no such challenge has appeared on the horizon as yet. It certainly does not appear in this petition. Time is running out, and petitions like these can even forestall necessary action by giving people the false sense that they “have done something.”

The manifesto makes it clear that two thirds of Americans are now antiwar. And many of that two-thirds care little for the Democratic Party or for Obama. But the word “renomination” was chosen to keep the locus of antiwar activity within the Democratic Party. That is a losing strategy as we have learned over and over again. Such statements as this petition are not casually penned and their words not lightly chosen.

Would it not be better to reach out to the Right, both Libertarians like Ron and Rand Paul and Justin Raimondo at Antiwar.com and Paleos like Dan McCarthy at The American Conservative or Lew Rockwell or the Future of Freedom Foundation? Some functionary in the White House sub-basement assigned to keep watch on antiwar intellectuals must have breathed a sigh of relief that no mention was made of that. But how can one refuse to develop such alliances with the antiwar Right and others? To fail at that will only lead to a smaller antiwar movement and the probability that Obama’s armies of Empire will continue to grind millions into the dust? Can that be justified morally?

Most of the signatories are principled women and men disgusted with war. But the action against Obama they call for does not match the crimes they cite – it does not even come close. Electoral action, among other forms of activism, is needed, and the considerable prestige attached to some on this list of signatories can help to initiate such action. On the other hand, some among the signers have always come down on the side of the Dems in the end, no matter what they do. Let us hope that the latter are not in the driver’s seat and that this manifesto is but one brief step on a determined and forceful march to field a badly needed alternative in 2012. The hour is late and lives by the score are lost every day at Obama’s hand.

John V. Walsh can be reached at john.endwar@gmail.com. Read other articles by John V..

This article was posted on Friday, January 28th, 2011 at 8:00am and is filed under Anti-war, Democrats, Elections, Obama.

Published on Thursday, January 27, 2011 by Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR)

Centrism Wins! Media Marvel at Obama's Move to the Right

With increasing vehemence since the midterm elections, pundits and journalists have recommended Barack Obama move to the right--and now are citing recent polling to suggest that the president has benefited from following their advice. But there is little evidence that Obama's current approval ratings have anything to do with a rightward shift, and the entire conversation rests on the premise that Obama was governing from the left in the first place.

There is little evidence that Obama's current approval ratings have anything to do with a rightward shift, and the entire conversation rests on the premise that Obama was governing from the left in the first place. (photo by Flickr user Dana Beveridge)

This is nothing new; there is a long corporate media tradition of urging Democratic presidents to move to the right in order to capture the "center." After the midterm elections, many pundits were encouraging Obama to "pull a Clinton"--based on the dubious notion that a liberal Bill Clinton, chastened by defeat in 1994, moved to the right and found success (Extra!, 1/11).

Obama's selection of conservative Democrat William Daley as his new chief of staff was seen as representative of some sort of political shift. The Washington Post (1/7/11) offered this somewhat confused explanation:

His moderate views and Wall Street credentials make him an unexpected choice for a president who has railed against corporate irresponsibility and tried, with limited success, to appease restive liberals who think he has not been tough enough on bankers.

Why would it be surprising for someone known for not being "tough enough on bankers" to appoint someone with Wall Street credentials? Daley's center-right views--not all that different from those of his predecessor, Rahm Emanuel--should mesh easily with the many members of Obama's economic team who also have Wall Street credentials.

A USA Today piece (1/7/11) was headlined "Daley Choice Puts a Moderate in Play"--as if there weren't many "moderates" around to begin with. (Emanuel, Daley's predecessor, got similar praise from corporate media for holding views that were not "popular with the Democratic Party's liberal base"--Time, 11/13/08; FAIR Media Advisory, 11/26/08.) An L.A. Times (1/7/11) assessment, "Obama Chooses Former Clinton Staffers in a Move to the Center," sent a similar message.

Soon enough, the press began touting Obama's rise in the polls as evidence that the public wanted "centrism" as much as the media did. As the L.A. Times explained (1/24/11), Obama "retooled his West Wing to include more moderate voices....and made new overtures to the business community. His polls have rebounded on the eve of his second State of the Union address, passing the 50 percent threshold in a series of major surveys."

On ABC World News (1/23/11), reporter David Kerley declared:

President Obama is much higher in the polls than he was just weeks ago. His charm offensive with business, appointments of business-friendly staff and a productive lame duck session have put him on a roll.... Moving to the center, talking about cutting spending, creating jobs is working.

In the run-up to the State of the Union, CNN's Wolf Blitzer declared (1/25/11), "A lot of people say the best advice he got was to move back to the center and start compromising with Republicans." If by "a lot of people," Blitzer means the reporters and pundits who were giving that advice, he's absolutely correct. But he went further:

It's helping him in the polls. There's no doubt about that. You can see, in our most recent job approval number, 55 percent. It was in the 40s, low 40s, not that long ago. So this move to the center, it certainly seems to be helping him with the American public.

Blitzer's guest, comedian Bill Maher, suggested that there was little reason to assume this explains Obama's apparent bump in the polls. Looking at some of the overall trends, it would not appear that Obama's approval ratings have shifted dramatically; Talking Points Memo (1/26/11) finds his approval rating in a wide range of polls now averages 50.1 percent, and that average has never been below 44 percent during his entire presidency. The end of the election season, which produced a torrent of negative advertising directed at Obama and the Democratic Congress, could explain some of the modest shift in the recent numbers, as could Obama's December 22 signing of a bill repealing the unpopular Don't Ask Don't Tell policy.

Polling bump or not, the media lesson is remarkably consistent. After the State of the Union speech, "Obama Adjusts Course Toward the Center" was the headline at USA Today (1/26/11). Reporter Susan Page declared the night "marked the culmination of a three-month transformation that has rebooted Barack Obama's presidency." The new Obama "proposed more centrist policies in a less combative tone" and was "following the Clinton comeback playbook."

The corporate media know that playbook well by now--indeed, they largely wrote it--and they are heartened to see Obama taking their advice.

Public Citizen's take on the State of the Union

Public Citizen's take on the State of the Union

This was inspiring rhetoric from President Barack Obama in last night’s State of the Union address.

Many of the president’s broad themes — especially the need to promote innovation, step up public investment, and preserve a vital, affirmative role for government — are important expressions of how the nation can do big things.

But there were many sources of concern in the speech as well. In too many cases, there was a disconnect between positive themes and troubling policy proposals.

In these instances, rather than articulating an agenda for doing big things, President Obama devoted energy and time to offering goodies to corporate interests and shackling his government with a self-destructive budgetary freeze.

Nothing could be more important than launching a clean energy revolution.

The president placed investment in clean energy atop his innovation agenda, but his remarks don’t suggest anything on the scale of what is needed. It is a great idea to pay for clean energy investment by ending subsidies for Big Oil and fossil fuels, but the president has only proposed cuts worth about $4 billion a year — not nearly enough to fund an energy transformation. And Congress has refused to enact these cuts. Does the president propose investments even if he can’t offset the cost with more oil revenues?

Even worse, Obama described the alternatives to oil as equal to one another. They are not.

Though backed by powerful corporate interests, nuclear is far too costly and dangerous to pursue. Using natural gas is no solution to the climate crisis, and future supplies depend significantly on poisonous fracking technologies. Clean coal is imaginary — an industry-invented chimera.

Many of President Obama’s proposals are politically driven efforts to court Big Business, and are downright harmful.

• The president reiterated his support for a NAFTA-style trade deal with Korea. He said the deal would “support” 70,000 jobs, but even the relevant government agency, the International Trade Commission, acknowledges the deal will lead to a net loss of U.S. jobs. We’ve seen the NAFTA movie over and over. Why does the president propose to replay it?
• Although the president insisted he would defend rules to advance important public purposes, he also said that “to reduce barriers to growth and investment, I’ve ordered a review of government regulations.” There is no credible evidence that regulation is a barrier to growth. And, as yesterday’s report from the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission reminds us, a lack of regulation led directly to the financial crisis and the Great Recession.
• Although the president said he did not want to address budgetary concerns “on the backs of our most vulnerable citizens,” he is ready to look at Republican proposals on “medical malpractice reform.” Unfortunately, those proposals are not about reducing the actual incidence of medical malpractice, which continues at epidemic levels, and they’re not about lowering cost. They are about stripping malpractice victims of the right to go to court for compensation. Medical malpractice lawsuit costs are actually falling, and they do not constitute a significant portion of overall healthcare spending. Limits on patients’ access to justice are nothing more than a gift to health insurance companies and healthcare providers, at the expense of injured patients.

By agreeing to the Republican position that we need aggressive short-term measures to reduce the deficit — even as one in six people seeking full-time work are unable to find it, and as the productive powers of the nation remain massively underutilized — President Obama has hamstrung his ability to undertake bold initiatives. Even so, there are large revenue sources available.

A Wall Street speculation tax could raise $150 billion a year and would be enormously popular. The administration has, so far, refused to consider it seriously.

The president pointed to another huge revenue source: closing corporate tax loopholes. However, his pledge to offset increased revenues with a general corporate tax cut makes this nothing more than a wash for the national treasury.

Of course, President Obama has to work with a Republican-controlled House of Representatives, and his remarks were tailored not only to reach out to the opposition party, but to advance an agenda that has some prospect of being adopted.

It’s one thing to scale back and find strategic points of convergence. It’s another to support damaging policies.

There have been many worrisome indicators of the president moving to more corporate-friendly positions in the past few months. Yet the White House remains susceptible to public pressure for the public interest. It was notable in the State of the Union address that the president did not indicate support for proposals to cut Social Security benefits, likely the result of an aggressive advocacy campaign by public interest campaigners.

So, we have our work cut out for us in the coming months.

We must demand that our president live up to his inspiring rhetoric, where “we measure progress by the success of our people [and] the opportunities for a better life that we pass on to our children.”

Stay tuned.

Robert Weissman, President

Published on Tuesday, January 25, 2011 by In These Times

Obama to Push Bogus ‘Competitiveness’ Theme in State of the Union Address

by Roger Bybee

Boosting "American competitiveness" and creating jobs through increased exports will reportedly be the key theme of President Obama's plan for economic recovery detailed in tonight's State of the Union speech.

This familiar theme, a slickly-disguised appeal to support corporate globalization, plays upon our reflexive pride in American workmanship. It is built upon President Obama's empty claim that "we can compete with anybody in the world," as he put it in a speech in my unemployment-wracked hometown of Racine, Wis., last July.

A majority of U.S. "trade" consists of intra-firm transfers within the same corporation. For example, GE sends machinery and parts to Mexico as "exports" and then "imports" finished products. (photo by Flickr user jimw / jim Winstead)

What does that really mean? Most of the "foreign competition" that U.S. workers face actually comes from foreign subsidiaries of US-based corporations like GE, Ford, GM, Boeing, Microsoft, which operate in places like China and Mexico to exploit low-wage labor. You've got that right: A majority of U.S. "trade" consists of intra-firm transfers within the same corporation. For example, GE sends machinery and parts to Mexico as "exports" and then "imports" finished products.

Thus the entire competitiveness framework is bogus.

It merely means more NAFTA-style "free trade" agreements that already have cost millions of jobs and driven down wages. And it sets up a collision course between the White House and US labor—both the AFL-CIO and Change to Win federations— over the upcoming vote on the US-South Korea Free Trade Agreement (KORUS).

On January 19, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka blasted the deal as a "Bush-style" agreement that fails to protect U.S. jobs from being offshored. He pledged that opposition “will be a major priority” of the AFL-CIO. In a strongly-worded statement, Change to Win denounced the motives of the pro-KORUS corporate chorus:

It’s crystal clear why the US Chamber is supporting a deal effectively shipping over 150,000 American jobs overseas: As the nation’s chief cheerleader for outsourcing, the Chamber gets to go to bat for its top corporate members (the CEOs of JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Boeing and GE, Chamber members and outsourcers all...) and gets a jump-start on one of its key goals for 2011: tax breaks for outsourcers.

The "competiveness" framework is essentially a call to pretend that U.S. workers and U.S. corporations share the same interest in globalization. As Nobel-Prize winning economist Paul Krugman points out,

the interests of nominally “American” corporations and the interests of the nation, which were never the same, are now less aligned than ever before.

Take the case of General Electric, whose chief executive, Jeffrey Immelt, has just been appointed to head [Obama's] advisory board [on competitiveness]. ...

But with fewer than half its workers based in the United States and less than half its revenues coming from U.S. operations, G.E.’s fortunes have very little to do with U.S. prosperity.

In particular, the South Korea deal will be a cruel new blow to American workers, despite the "increased exports" hype. The Economic Policy Institute has calculated that the South Korea FTA will cost 159,000 US jobs. Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch has pointed out numerous U.S. state and local laws that will be over-ridden by the FTA, and has documented numerous ways in which the proposed deal falls far short of the United Auto Workers' standards for the agreement (which the UAW nonetheless mysteriously endorsed anyway, as noted here, here, and here.)

A 'CORPORATE PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE'?

The juggernaut of corporate campaign donations and their lobbyists lined up behind the Korea free trade deal cannot be stopped by labor acting inside the Washington Beltway.

“The labor movement has learned something from the last two years about jobs and investment: We can’t count on the political process here in Washington to get the job done,” declared Trumka.

In Washington, it is as though the estimated 4.9 million job
losses, 43,000 factory closings, and falling U.S. wages flowing from
free trade deals like NAFTA and China's entry into the World Trade
Organization never happened.

Equally unimportant are the opinions of the 86% of Americans who emphatically agree "that outsourcing of manufacturing to foreign countries with lower wages was a reason the U.S. economy was struggling and more people weren't being hired."

So who really matters on the trade issue?

As the New York Times reports, the South Korea deal "is playing well" with the audience that truly counts, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. It's apparently no problem to the White House that the Chamber hauled in millions from firms engaged in offshoring US jobs and then turned around and spent tens of millions in the 2010 mid-terms to defeat Democrats and elect pro-offshoring Republicans.

However, the drive for the job-destroying KORUS could well be met with a new grassroots approach, as suggested by Trunka's comment about the limits of Washington lobbying.

At the same time, Teamsters President James Hoffa, Jr., is promoting a "Corporate Pledge of Allegiance" that US corporate CEOs will be called upon to sign. "They’ve got their $2 trillion in profits, and now we're calling upon them to create jobs here in the US," he stated on "The Ed Show."

Ideally, the Corporate Pledge strategy could be used at the local level to visit CEOs across the United States, mobilizing labor's untapped power and reaching out to the 86% of the public worried about what corporations are doing to our economy and our futures.

Stay tuned for a major battle over KORUS.

© 2011 In These Times

The "New Centrism" and Its Discontents

The "New Centrism" and Its Discontents

Tuesday 25 January 2011

by: George Lakoff, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

There is no ideology of the "center." What is called a "centrist" or a "moderate" is actually very different - a biconceptual, someone who is conservative on some issues and progressive on others, in many, many possible combinations. Why does this matter? From the perspective of how the brain works, the distinction is crucial.

Because we think with our brains, all thought is physical. Our moral and political worldviews are realized as brain circuits with strong synapses. If you have two conflicting worldviews, you have two brain circuits that are mutually inhibitory, so that when one is activated, it is strengthened and the other is shut off and weakened. When a worldview applies to a given issue, there is a neural binding circuit linking the worldview circuit to that issue circuit in such a way that the issue is understood in terms of that worldview. The right language will activate that issue as understood via that worldview. Using that language strengthens that worldview.

When a Democrat "moves to the center," he is adopting a conservative position - or the language of a conservative position. Even if only the language is adopted and not the policy, there is an important effect. Using conservative language activates the conservative view, not only of the given issue, but the conservative worldview in general, which, in turn, strengthens the conservative worldview in the brains of those listening. That leads to more people thinking conservative thoughts, and, hence, supporting conservative positions on issues and conservative candidates. Material policy matters. Language use, over and over, affects how citizens understand policy choices, which puts pressure on legislators, and ultimately affects what policies are chosen. Language wars are policy wars.

And, so, to the State of the Union Address. The president will be using business language to indicate that he is pro-business. He will speak of the need for "competitiveness" as if America were a corporation, and will stress "investments" in education, research, infrastructure and new energy. Paul Krugman, in The New York Times, writes:

The favorable interpretation, as I said, is that it's just packaging for an economic strategy centered on public investment, investment that's actually about creating jobs now while promoting longer-term growth. The unfavorable interpretation is that Mr. Obama and his advisers really believe that the economy is ailing because they've been too tough on business, and that what America needs now is corporate tax cuts and across-the-board deregulation.

My guess is that we're mainly talking about packaging here. And if the president does propose a serious increase in spending on infrastructure and education, I'll be pleased.

For Krugman, language can be just "packaging" and the packaging doesn't matter if the right policies are followed.

But conservatives know better. They know that they had better get their language front and center. As Eric Cantor said, "We want America to be competitive, but then he talks about investing …When we hear 'invest' from anyone in Washington, to me that means more spending.... The investment needs to occur in the private sector." Mitch McConnell had the same reaction, "Any time they want to spend, they call it investment."

Conservatives have made the word "spending" their own. It has come to mean wasteful or profligate spending, as if the government just takes money out of your pocket and wastes is on people who don't deserve it. "Spending" as used by conservatives, really mean the use of money to help people. Since conservatives believe in individual, not social, responsibility, they think it is immoral to use one person's tax money on helping someone who should be helping himself. The word "spending" has been used that way so often, that for many people, it always evokes that conservative frame, and, hence, strengthens that frame and worldview that makes sense of it. When Democrats use the world "spending" assuming falsely that it is a neutral economic term, they are helping conservatives.

Conservatives are trained not to use the language of liberals. Liberals are not so trained. Liberals have to learn not to stick to their own language, and not move rightward in language use. Never use the word "entitlement" - Social Security and Medicare are earned. Taking money from them is stealing. Pensions are delayed payments for work already done. They are part of contracted pay for work. Not paying pensions is taking wages from those who have earned them. Nature isn't free for the taking. Nature is what nurtures us, and is of ultimate value - human value as well as economic value. Pollution and deforestation are destroying nature. Privatization is not eliminating government - it is introducing government of our lives by corporations, for their profit, not ours. The mission of government is to protect and empower all citizens, because no one makes it on their own. And the more you get from government, the more you owe morally. Government is about "necessities" - health, education, housing, protection, jobs with living wages, and so on - not about "programs." Economic success lies in human well-being, not in stock prices, or corporate and bank profits.

These are truths. We need to use language that expresses those truths.

Obama's new centrism must be viewed from the perspective of biconceptualism. In his Tucson speech, Obama started off with the conservative view of the shooting. It was a crazy, lone gunman, unpredictable, there should be no blame - as if brain-changing language did not exist. It sounded like Sarah Palin. But at the end, he became the progressive of his election campaign, bringing back the word "empathy" and describing American democracy as essentially based on empathy, social responsibility, striving for excellence and public service. This is the progressive moral worldview, believed implicitly by all progressives, but hardly ever explicitly discussed. The end of the Tucson address has helped bring back support from his progressive base. Will "empathy" return in the State of the Union Address?

Obama's message in his warm-up video to his supporters said that the economy can be rebuilt only if we put aside our differences, work together, find common ground, and so on. It's the E Pluribus Unum message - no red states or blue states, just red, white and blue states message. It's a message that resonates with a majority of Americans. And, so, his poll numbers have risen.

How realistic is it?

Robert Kuttner is unconvinced.

He is now Mr. Reasonable Centrist - except that in substance there is no reasonable center to be had.

A well funded and tightly organized right wing has been pulling American politics to the right for three decades now. And with a few instructive exceptions, Democrats who respond by calling for a new centrism are just acting as the right's enablers.

What exactly is the beneficial substance of this centrism? Just how far right do we have to go for Republicans to cut any kind of deal? Isn't the mirage of a Third Way a series of moving targets - where every compromise begets a further compromise?

Kuttner has good reason to feel this way. The conservative moral worldview has a highest principle: to preserve, defend and advance that worldview itself. Radical conservatives have taken over the Republican party. Their goal is to make the country - and the world - as conservative as they are. They want to impose strict father morality everywhere. In economics it means laissez-fair capitalism, with the rich seen as the most disciplined, moral and deserving of people, and the poor as undisciplined and unworthy of safety nets. In religion, their God as the punitive strict father God, sending you to heaven or hell depending how well you adhere to conservative moral principles - individual not social responsibility, strict authority, punitive law, the use of overwhelming force in defending conservative moral principles, and so on. Big government is fine when used to those ends, but not when used to social ends. Only "spending" on measures to help people should be cut, not the use of money to fund what conservative morality approves of. The concern for the deficit is a ruse. They regularly support ideas that would raise, not lower the deficit. Science is to be believed if new weapons systems are based on it, but not if it shows that human pollutants are causing global warming and disastrous climate change.

The Obama strategy seems to be to drive a wedge between the responsible business community and the radical conservatives. Most Americans, whether Republican or Democrat, are in business and most people in business want the country - not just themselves - to thrive. Sensible business people rely on the best economics they can find, not just on ideological economics. And even the biconceptuals, who identify themselves with the conservative part of their brains, show empathy - their progressive sides - in many parts of their lives.

The biconceptuals include those who call themselves "moderates" and "independents" - a very significant part of the electorate, probably 15 to 20 percent, more than enough to swing any election.

What should progressives make of the "new centrism?"

First, they have to recognize the reality of biconceptualism. Adopting conservative language helps conservatism. Adopting conservative programs makes the world more conservative and, so, helps drive empathy from the world, and that is disastrous.

Second, progressives should recognize that the business of America is business - that there are successful businesses and businesspeople with progressive values, and they should be praised and courted - and separated from radical conservatives.

Third, progressives have to organize around a single morality, centered on empathy, both personal and social responsibility and excellence - being the best person you can be, not just for your own sake, but for the sake of you family, community and nation. All politics is moral; it is about the right things to do. Get your morality straight, learn to talk about it, then work on policy. It is patriotic to be progressive.

Fourth, progressives must understand the critical need for a communication system that rivals the conservative system: An overall understanding of conservatism, effective framing of progressive beliefs and real facts, training centers on understanding and articulating progressive thought, systems of spokespeople on call, booking agencies to book speakers on radio and tv, and in local venues like schools, churches and clubs.

Fifth, it is progressive to be firm, articulate and gentle. You can stand up for what you believe, while being gentlemanly and ladylike.

Sixth, progressives have to get over the idea that conservatives are either stupid, or mean or greedy - or all three. Conservatives are mostly people who have a different moral system from progressives.

A new centrism that makes sense ought to be one that unifies progressives under a single moral system centered on empathy; that recognizes, and shows respect for, the progressive side of biconceptuals; that respects the intelligence of conservatives; that allies with progressive businesspeople as well as with unions; that builds a communication system that brings it in touch with most Americans; that calls upon the love of nature; that is gentle and firm; and that refuses to move to the right, either in language or action.

If you start adopting conservative language and/or positions, you become conservative-lite, or worse.

This work by Truthout is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

Published on Monday, January 24, 2011 by Huffington Post

Mr. President: The Fight for the Middle Class Isn't in Washington

by Amy Dean

Tuesday night the nation will focus its attention on the president's State of the Union address, looking for solutions to the economic crisis in this country and in their own lives. We can hope to hear President Obama articulate a bold vision for restoring economic security to our nation's middle class. We can also hope that the president challenges members on both sides of the aisle to stop putting politics before the people's prosperity.

However, as the last two years have proven, hope is not enough. Presidential speeches and the hoped for newly moderated rhetoric of the Congress will not suffice to deliver results. Because while we are focused on Washington, Republicans backed by big business interests are undertaking a coordinated attack, rooted at the state level, on middle class employees. This attack could bring the end of the middle class as we have known it.

As the New York Times has reported, Republican legislatures in ten states across the country are pushing "right to work" laws that undermine the ability of employees who vote to join a union to have their choice respected. And even some states with Democratic governors are less focused on creating jobs than adopting measures that scapegoat those in the middle for economic problems caused by those at the top. The Republicans have been very smart tactically by framing the debate around these issues. We can only hope that people will not fall for their misdirection.

At the national level, Republicans will be talking about reducing the deficit and controlling spending. Their arguments are more about rhetoric than real action. Not only do their proposals stand little chance of being enacted, they are two-faced: even while talking about budget cuts, Republicans advocate huge tax cuts for the wealthy and seek to repeal the cost-saving measures and patient protections of health care reform. In truth, their still-heated rhetoric is primarily designed to give Republicans a message to take back into the districts in the next election cycle. We already know what they will be saying in six months or a year: "We tried to save you money, but the Democrats won't let us." The time to start responding to this disingenuous narrative is now.

We must recognize that the national posturing is a smoke screen designed to conceal the real battle, which is happening in the states.

At this very moment, conservatives are prepared with a scapegoat for the economic woes: unions and public employees. They have been very shrewd in using this time of crisis as an opportunity to drive a stake through the heart of the very organizations that have created the American middle class.

Masquerading their proposals as efforts to liberate working people from the yoke of big government, the right is attempting to systematically undermine the institutions that have historically allowed average people to attain a decent standard of living. Rather than seeking to bring everyone up to the standard of living wages and relative economic security that public employees have gained, Republicans are focused on bringing down those few people in our society who still have jobs that afford ordinary people hopes for health care and dignified retirement.

As a result, the campaign for the future of our country is now on. This is not about something as narrow as reelecting Barack Obama in 2012, or about the political future of any individual elected official. It is much bigger than that. We are in the fight of our lives.

So what do we do?

First, we can't focus all of our time and resources on the Congressional debate. The proposals being floated by the Republican House of Representatives make for good grandstanding, but, by and large, they stand no chance of actually being enacted. They are just being used to set the stage for the next election cycle. Therefore, we need to be building our own infrastructure in the districts, not treating local- and state-level politics as something that we can engage in for a few months at the end of each election cycle. We need to begin our conversation with voters in the districts today.

Second, we must make clear that initiatives like wage freezes and "right to work" laws are measures that are handcrafted by the Chamber of Commerce's lobbyists. Big business is pumping huge amounts of money into the effort to attack public employees and scale back regulations, with billionaires like the Koch brothers leading the way. That is who is really behind these drives. The extent to which the right is able to frame their message as a populist one is a measure of our failure to reveal the wealthy financiers backing their agenda.

Republicans frame their proposals as policies that will "get government and unions off your back." But what is actually being created as a result? Time and time again, these policies have not led to "trickle-down" prosperity, but have taken away gains made by average Americans and given them to corporations and those at the very top. By showing the interests that stand behind each side, we must demonstrate who is really the best advocate for Main Street.

Third, we draw a line in the sand with politicians -- and demand that the president lead the way in recognizing the crisis of the middle class. Whether they have a "D" behind their name or not, politicians should not receive one penny from progressives unless they are for increasing standards of living for average people and defending their rights to organize. Unfortunately, since the Clinton years, we have elected leaders who are taking our campaign money on one day and then distancing themselves from employees' organizations and public interest groups the next. These politicians must see that this will no longer fly. They must understand that Main Street is in a fight for its life, and they must act accordingly.

In America, the pot of rampant individualism and neglect of community has been roiling at a low boil for a long time. Ultimately, we must ask as a society: Do we want to be a place where the fire department comes if we have a fire in our homes? Is this a country where you can get care when you're sick, even if you're elderly or lose your job? Is America a place where, regardless of the town or neighborhood you live in, you can send your kids to a decent public school, with qualified professionals teaching our kids? Such things are the reason we agree to pay taxes and contribute to the common good.

At the end of the day, dismantling the government and attacking public servants means undoing these things. The President will articulate his vision in this fight on Tuesday and is even backing up words with actions like the NRLB's steps to protect organizing via majority sign-up. It's outside of Washington where we face the eliminations of people's ability to voluntarily come together in their workplace to have a say in the conditions of their employment. That would mean creating a country that has a huge gulf between the wealthy and everybody else. It means ending middle class America as we have known it. And that is not something we should let happen without a fight.

© 2011 Huffington Post

Amy Dean is co-author, with David Reynolds, of A New New Deal: How Regional Activism Will Reshape the American Labor Movement. She worked for nearly two decades in the labor movement and now works to develop new and innovative organizing strategies for social change organizations in progressive, labor, and faith communities. You can follow Amy on twitter at @amybdean or visit her web site at www.amybdean.com