Obama launches tax ploy against GOP

ALJAZEERA AMERICA

Obama launches tax ploy against GOP

State of the Union address pushes tax reforms to set stage for 2016 electoral fight

January 21, 2015 2:00AM ET

 

by David Cay Johnston @DavidCayJ

 

The most political law in America is the federal tax code. Far from being grounded in sound economics and the Constitutional duty to promote the general welfare, it’s shaped by influence won with campaign contributions and lobbying. We are about to see just how political tax law is thanks to a savvy move by President Barack Obama to frame the 2016 election in ways that will help Democrats keep the White House.

In his State of the Union address, the president proposed a host of tax ideas Republicans have long advocated in order to force them to choose between Main Street and Wall Street. He believes they will side with the rich, whose campaign donations are increasingly significant in elections and whose companies provide jobs for friends and family of politicians.

But the president’s strategy is not full-proof. There is a clever way for congressional Republicans to turn his proposal into a trap for the Democrats.

Obama’s tax plan

Obama’s proposals are pro children, family, savings and work. He would prevent a scheduled 11-percent tax increase in 2017 for full-time workers earning the minimum wage. He also wants tax simplifications that the IRS Taxpayer Advocate — a post that GOP lawmakers created in 1998 — has urged annually, to no avail.

Top Congressional Republicans immediately dismissed these proposals. Orrin Hatch, the Utah Republican who chairs the Senate Finance Committee, said Obama was fomenting “class warfare.” Rep. Charles Boustany, the Louisiana Republican who chairs the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, called Obama’s proposals “just another poke in the eye at Republicans.”

The president’s plan, which has no chance of adoption by the Republican majorities in the House and Senate, would raises taxes on the top half of one percent to benefit those in the middle class who pay taxes plus individuals among the working poor.

Obama’s proposals would cost $230 billion over ten years — less than $2 billion per month. The cost of this modest tax relief for middle class Americans would be paid by raising taxes at the top by $320 billion — a bit more than $2.6 billion per month.

The net effect would be to further reduce the federal budget deficit.
Republicans have steadily hammered Obama for increasing the federal debt even though on his watch the annual federal budget shortfall, the deficit, has fallen from 10 percent of the economy to under 3 percent. By the time Obama leaves office in two years the budget may even be in surplus for the first time since Bill Clinton’s presidency.

Polling suggests that Americans are increasingly aware of rampant inequality, especially as their own fortunes decline.

 

Most of the Obama tax increases would fall on people who inherited their wealth and those with incomes of more than $2 million — roughly the top tenth of one percent. Obama would raise the capital gains tax rate on incomes above $500,000 to 28 percent, the rate signed into law by President Ronald Reagan in 1986. Only the top half of one percent would be affected by this increase, which would not apply to salaries.

He also wants capital gains taxes paid on appreciated assets people inherit, closing what the White House calls the “trust fund loophole.”

Obama’s proposals have popular support. Large majorities of Americans, polls show, believe the best off Americans should pay more taxes. Surveys report that many Republicans favor high taxes on the rich, including one in which more than half of Republicans supported a 50-percent tax rate on incomes of more than $1 million annually.

Growing inequality

Such polling suggests that Americans are increasingly aware of rampant inequality, especially as their own fortunes decline. Obama’s State of the Union address came the day after OxFam, the British charity, issued a  report showing that next year more than half of the planet’s wealth will be owned by just 1 percent of the global population. Credit Suisse, in its own report on inequality, said that just 80 people own as much wealth as the poorest 3.5 billion people.
This growing concentration of wealth is largely driven by government policies, including reducing tax rates on the highest incomes, radically reducing audits of the wealthy and of corporations and a plethora of complex regulatory rules that take from the many to benefit the few, all of which I have been exposing for two decades.

In America real per capita income was $1,000 less in 2012 than in 2000. The same period saw a severe narrowing of stock and bond ownership. The number of taxpayers reporting capital gains, for example, fell from 1 in 8 in 2000 to 1 in 15 in 2012. The total share of dividends going to Americans making $2 million or more rose from 50 to 62 percent in that time period.

Inequality has become such a major issue that even former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney sought last week to remake himself into an economic populist as he readies a possible third campaign for the White House. “Under President Obama the rich have gotten richer, income inequality has gotten worse and there are more people in poverty in American than ever before,” Romney said to Republican National Committee members in San Diego on Jan. 16.

Republican strategy

If the Republicans instead follow the lead of Hatch, Boustany and Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, it will enable Democrats in the 2016 elections to pillory them as tools of the plutocrats with no real concern for most Americans.

That may not help much in House races, where gerrymandering by state legislatures has corralled Democrats and their allies into highly concentrated districts. But it could provide a big boost in 2016 for Senate races and the race for the White House, where demographic factors favor the Democrats.
But Republicans could turn the tables on the president if they think strategically. Instead of dismissing the proposals, they could strip out the tax increases on the wealthy in the bill and pass the rest of it as presented.

That would put Obama in the hot seat. He could veto the bill because the tax relief for the middle class would not be paid for from higher taxes on the wealthy, but that decision might anger middle-class voters who wanted lower taxes. Or he could sign it, leaving the rich with their tax breaks and risking public scorn for lacking a set of principles while also allowing the federal budget deficit to increase.

However this fight goes, keep in mind that what we will witness is not real tax reform, tax simplification or basing tax burdens on the common sense principle of ability to pay. It’s all about electoral politics.

David Cay Johnston, an investigative reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize while at The New York Times, teaches business, tax and property law of the ancient world at the Syracuse University College of Law. He is the best-selling author of “Perfectly Legal,” “Free Lunch” and “The Fine Print” and editor of the new anthology “Divided: The Perils of Our Growing Inequality.”

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera America's editorial policy.

Obama ditches the centrists: How a break from neoliberalism boosted his popularity

SALON

Saturday, Jan 17, 2015 08:00 AM EST

Obama ditches the centrists: How a break from neoliberalism boosted his popularity

The president's more popular than he's been in nearly two years. Here's why that should have neoliberals scared

Elias Isquith Follow

Topics: Andrew Sullivan, Jonathan Chait, sam wang, neoliberalism, Rahm Emanuel, Andrew Cuomo, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Tony Blair, Third Way, Affordable Care Act, Obamacare, Ronald Reagan, Editor's Picks, Media News, News, Politics News

 

 
Andrew Cuomo, Barack Obama, Rahm Emanuel (Credit: AP/Mike Groll/Reuters/Junko Kimura-Matsumoto/Larry Downing/Photo montage by Salon)

For quite some time now, the media’s desire to see the American economy return to its ’90s-era peak — or at least improve enough to be safely ignored in favor of a new overarching narrative — has been nearly palpable. Which is why it’s not shocking to see how a spate of good news about the economy has changed the conventional wisdom about the President Obama’s record, with “objective” reporters describing him as on the rebound, and with his most ardent defenders busting out superlatives like it’s 2008. Andrew Sullivan is once again calling him the center-left version of Ronald Reagan. And Jonathan Chait believes history will ultimately recognize his performance as not just good but capital-G great. That’s that, I guess; do we really need to bother with the rest of his second term?

Even though I snark, and even though the persistence of stagnant wages means we’re still experiencing a McJobs recovery, it’s certainly true that the president’s followed his second midterm shellacking with a surprisingly good few weeks. His poll numbers are looking better than they have in almost two years, and Princeton election analyst Sam Wang says it’s “a real phenomenon,” not a fluke. But while Sullivan, and especially Chait, write as if Obama’s comeback were basically inevitable, I think there’s a case to be made that the president’s rising popularity — while certainly due in part to his decision to enact less crippling austerity than the Eurozone has and Republicans wanted — has more to do with recent actions of his that were a break from the approach that defined most of his second (and nearly all of his first) term.

Before I describe that change, though, I want to make a few things clear up front, so nobody gets the wrong idea. As Chait partially acknowledges, and as any political scientist will tell you, Americans give their presidents entirely too much blame and credit for the state of the economy (usually their No. 1 metric), which is often considerably outside any politician’s immediate control. What’s more, there’s reason to believe that at least some part of Obama’s recent good fortune owes to the plummeting price of oil, which despite what politicians of both parties tell you when they’re campaigning, has essentially nothing to do with whatever’s happening in the Oval Office. Last but not least, the president’s approval rating is not the product of an exact science; it’s more like a blurry snapshot of a moment in time. So we shouldn’t conclude too much from the recent polling, one way or another.
All that said, both Wang’s data and an anecdotal impression of recent (not-conservative) media will tell you that Obama’s ascending popularity kicked off sometime between late November and mid-December. Not incidentally, this was also the period when the president began not only acting more aggressively in terms of using his power unilaterally, which he’s actually been doing in some form or another since last year, if not earlier, but also supporting policies that could be easily characterized as typically liberal. In November, he announced a major change in how the federal government handled undocumented immigrants, which predictably cost him support from working-class whites but further established his party as the pluralist, multicultural alternative to the overwhelmingly white GOP. And in December, he not only spoke more frankly about his blackness than he had at any point in his presidency, but also announced a break from a half-century-plus-old policy by taking steps to normalize relations with Cuba.

Having walked head-on toward what have historically been two of the Republicans’ most effective attacks on Democrats — the party’s association with nonwhites and its “softness” in the realm of foreign policy, especially regarding communists — Obama went even further in January by unveiling a plan to offer millions of Americans a college education for free. He did this despite the fact that the policy would easily be described by conservatives as promoting “big government” (as indeed it was), and despite the fact that the plan’s funding would be unapologetically redistributionist. Much more than the Affordable Care Act, which also relied on using high-end taxes to provide health insurance for the working class and the poor but did so through an embrace of subsidies and by relying on market incentives, Obama’s college plan represented a straightforward argument for having government do what a broken market could not. This was not a DLC, neoliberal-style proposal to encourage the market to act, through outsourcing and tax incentives. This was simply using government.

To many, that probably seems like a distinction without a difference. But that would only be true if the neoliberal model of deregulation, outsourcing, privatization and free trade that was made Democratic Party orthodoxy by Bill Clinton (and Labour Party orthodoxy by Tony Blair) could actually reach traditional liberal ends through traditionally conservative means. You’ll certainly be able to find those who disagree, but I believe the verdict is in, and it is negative. That doesn’t mean the era of neoliberal government is over, of course; there are still plenty of high-profile “New Democrats,” like Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo or the woman who is likely to be the party’s next presidential nominee. For that matter, Obama’s recent “My Brother’s Keeper” initiative and his continued support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade proposal show that he himself has hardly made a clean break from the “third way.”

Still, even if his steps are halting, and even if part of his willingness to flirt with old-fashioned liberalism stems from his knowledge that a GOP Congress all but ensures none of his proposals will come to pass during the rest of his term, Obama’s clearly begun to reverse the rightward drift his party has experienced over the past generation. (Or at the very least, he hasn’t been an implacable foe of those who’d like to reverse the trend further.) Posterity may look back at this as a far cry from the center-left Reagan and transformational president liberals dreamed of back in 2008, but American politics changes at a glacial pace, and if President Obama leaves office in 2016 with the mainstream to the left of where it was when he first started, that would be no small thing.

Elias Isquith is a staff writer at Salon, focusing on politics. Follow him on Twitter at @eliasisquith, and email him at eisquith@salon.com.

Obama Outperforms Reagan on Jobs, Growth and Investing

FORBES

Obama Outperforms Reagan on Jobs, Growth and Investing

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) today issued America’s latest jobs report covering August.  And it’s a disappointment.  The economy created an additional 142,000 jobs last month. After 6 consecutive months over 200,000, most pundits expected the string to continue, including ADP which just yesterday said 204,000 jobs were created in August. 

One month variation does not change a trend

Even though the plus-200k monthly string was broken (unless revised upward at a future date,) unemployment did continue to decline and is now reported at only 6.1%.  Jobless claims were just over 300k; lowest since 2007.  Despite the lower than expected August jobs number, America will create about 2.5 million new jobs in 2014.

And that is great news.

Back in May, 2013 (15 months ago) the Dow was out of its recession doldrums and hitting new highs. I asked readers if Obama could, economically, be the best modern President?  Through discussion of that question, the #1 issue raised by readers was whether the stock market was a good economic barometer for judging “best.”  Many complained that the measure they were watching was jobs – and that too many people were still looking for work.

To put this week’s jobs report in economic perspective I reached out to Bob Deitrick, CEO of Polaris Financial Partners and author of “Bulls, Bears and the Ballot Box” (which I profiled in October, 2012 just before the election) for some explanation.  Since then Polaris’ investor newsletters have consistently been the best predictor of economic performance. Better than all the major investment houses.

This is the best private sector jobs creation performance in American history

Bob 

Deitrick – “President Reagan has long been considered the best modern economic President.  So we compared his performance dealing with the oil-induced recession of the 1980s with that of President Obama and his performance during this ‘Great Recession.’

As this unemployment chart shows, President Obama’s job creation kept unemployment from peaking at as high a level as President Reagan, and promoted people into the workforce faster than President Reagan.

President Obama has achieved a 6.1% unemployment rate in his 6th year, fully one year faster than President Reagan did.  At this point in his presidency, President Reagan was still struggling with 7.1% unemployment, and he did not reach into the mid-low 6% range for another full year.  So, despite today’s number, the Obama administration has still done considerably better at job creating and reducing unemployment than did the Reagan administration.

We forecast unemployment will fall to around 5.4% by summer, 2015.  A rate President Reagan was unable to achieve during his two terms.”

What about the Labor Participation Rate?

Much has been made about the poor results of the labor participation rate, which has shown more stubborn recalcitrance as this rate remains higher even as jobs have grown.

 

Bob Deitrick: “The labor participation rate adds in jobless part time workers and those in marginal work situations with those seeking full time work.  This is not a “hidden” unemployment.  It is a measure tracked since 1900 and called ‘U6.’ today by the BLS.

As this chart shows, the difference between reported unemployment and all unemployment – including those on the fringe of the workforce – has remained pretty constant since 1994.

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics – Databases, Tables and Calculators by Subject

Labor participation is affected much less by short-term job creation, and much more by long-term demographic trends. As this chart from the BLS shows, as the Baby Boomers entered the workforce and societal acceptance of women working changed, labor participation grew.


Now that ‘Boomers’ are retiring we are seeing the percentage of those seeking employment decline.  This has nothing to do with job availability, and everything to do with a highly predictable aging demographic.


What’s now clear is that the Obama administration policies have outperformed the Reagan administration policies for job creation and unemployment reduction.  Even though Reagan had the benefit of a growing Boomer class to ignite economic growth, while Obama has been forced to deal with a retiring workforce developing special needs. During the 8 years preceding Obama there was a net reduction in jobs in America.  We now are rapidly moving toward higher, sustainable jobs growth.”

Economic growth, including manufacturing, is driving jobs

When President Obama took office America was gripped in an offshoring boom, started years earlier, pushing jobs to the developing world.  Manufacturing was declining in America, and plants were closing across the nation.

This week the Institute for Supply Management (ISM) released its manufacturing report, and it surprised nearly everyone.  The latest Purchasing Managers Index (PMI) scored 59, 2 points higher than July and about that much higher than prognosticators expected.  This represents 63 straight months of economic expansion, and 25 consecutive months of manufacturing expansion.

New orders were up 3.3 points to 66.7, with 15 consecutive months of improvement and reaching the highest level since April, 2004 – 5 years prior to Obama becoming President.  Not surprisingly, this economic growth provided for 14 consecutive months of improvement in the employment index.  Meaning that the “grass roots” economy made its turn for the better just as the DJIA was reaching those highs back in 2013 – demonstrating that index is still the leading indicator for jobs that it has famously always been.

As the last 15 months have proven, jobs and economy are improving, and investors are benefiting

The stock market has converted the long-term growth in jobs and GDP into additional gains for investors.  Recently the S&P has crested 2,000 – reaching new all time highs.  Gains made by investors earlier in the Obama administration have further grown, helping businesses  raise capital and improving the nest eggs of almost all Americans.  And laying the foundation for recent, and prolonged job growth.

 

Bob Deitrick: While most Americans think they are not involved with the stock market, truthfully they are.  Via their 401K, pension plan and employer savings accounts 2/3 of Americans have a clear vested interest in stock performance.

As this chart shows, over the first 67 months of their presidencies there is a clear “winner” from an investor’s viewpoint. A dollar invested when Reagan assumed the presidency would have yielded a staggering 190% return.  Such returns were unheard of prior to his leadership.

However, it is undeniable that President Obama has surpassed the previous president.  Investors have gained a remarkable 220% over the last 5.5 years!  This level of investor growth is unprecedented by any administration, and has proven quite beneficial for everyone.

In 2009, with pension funds underfunded and most private retirement accounts savaged by the financial meltdown and Wall Street losses, Boomers and Seniors were resigned to never retiring.  The nest egg appeared gone, leaving the ‘chickens’ to keep working.  But now that the coffers have been reloaded increasingly people age 55 – 70 are happily discovering they can quit their old jobs and spend time with family, relax, enjoy hobbies or start new at-home businesses from their laptops or tablets.  It is due to a skyrocketing stock market that people can now pursue these dreams and reduce the labor participation rates for ‘better pastures.”

Where myth meets reality

There is another election in just 8 weeks.  Statistics will be bandied about.  Monthly data points will be hotly contested.  There will be a lot of rhetoric by candidates on all sides.  But, understanding the prevailing trends is critical.  Recognizing that first the economy, then the stock market and now jobs are all trending upward is important – even as all 3 measures will have short-term disappointments.

There are a lot of reasons voters elect a candidate.  Jobs and the economy are just one category of factors.  But, for those who place a high priority on jobs, economic performance and the markets the data clearly demonstrates which presidential administration has performed best.  And shows a very clear trend one can expect to continue into 2015.

Economically, President Obama’s administration has outperformed President Reagan’s in all commonly watched categories.  Simultaneously the current administration has reduced the deficit, which skyrocketed under Reagan. 
Additionally, Obama has reduced federal employment, which grew under Reagan (especially when including military personnel,) and truly delivered a “smaller government.”  Additionally, the current administration has kept inflation low, even during extreme international upheaval, failure of foreign economies (Greece) and a dramatic slowdown in the European economy.

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History says Democrats are better at growing the economy than Republicans
Investor returns have been better during Obama administration than any other presidency
Why Wall Street forecasters have consistently missed the Obama market run-up

Myth Busted: Republicans Wrong Again as Obamacare Premiums Set to Decrease in 2015

Myth Busted: Republicans Wrong Again as Obamacare Premiums Set to Decrease in 2015

By: Trevor LaFaucimore from Trevor LaFauci

Saturday, September, 6th, 2014, 12:45 pm

Republicans were hoping that some great Obamacare news would slip out on a Friday afternoon and go completely unnoticed by the media.

They thought wrong.

This afternoon the non-profit Kaiser Family Foundation released a report projecting premium increases for the 2015 year under the Affordable Care Act. After years of double-digit increases, next year’s premiums will not only drop into single digits, but there will be an average decrease of premiums by roughly 0.8 percent. Overall the trends are clear: a few small states will show rate increases but large states, and more specifically large cities, are will show fairly small changes. Since the small states tend to show higher variation, they also don’t affect the overall average very much so when all is said and done there’s a very realistic chance the overall premium levels will be close to zero.

As Mother Jones puts it, this result is “genuinely stunning.”

The result should be especially stunning for our Republican friends who have insisted for five years that Obamacare would be unable to support itself in the long run. They deemed it a “death spiral” and insisted the program would be crushed under its own weight. For five years, they’ve insisted that the program would be unsustainable in the long run, with a major reason being the fact that premiums would increase to levels that would be unaffordable for the average American. In fact, as recently as May of this year, The Hill released a report stating that double-digit premium hikes were set to emerge for 2015.

Yet, despite these Chicken Little predictions, Obamacare has once again proven to be an unqualified success.

The reason for this is that Obamacare is doing exactly what it was intended to do. Despite the repeated doomsday predictions Republicans have given us for the past five years, the law is not only not failing, but it’s achieving a remarkable string of successes that even proponents of the law did not see coming. In fact, it’s doing so well that’s it has now entered what economist Paul Krugman has called a “life spiral.” Krugman explains that good news continues to breed more and more good news because “the huge surge in enrollments late in the day meant that the risk pool this year is better than insurers expected, and they now expect 2015 to be better still. Also, importantly, big enrollments mean that more insurers are entering the market, increasing competition. And, of course, the better the deal, the more people will sign up: success feeds success.”

In other words, the exact opposite of what Republicans predicted would happen.

Perhaps Ezra Klein said it best today, when he wrote:

Imagine taking a time machine back to 2010 and telling Republicans in Congress, who were arguing that the CBO was wildly underestimating Obamacare’s cost, that the law would be cheaper than predicted and, at least in the states that accepted its Medicaid dollars, cover more people than the Congressional Budget Office thought. After the laughing and mocking and the calling of security, let’s say you offered this prediction in the form of a bet. What odds do you think Obamacare’s critics would have offered? 2:1? 5:1? 10:1?

As both Klein and Krugman point out, our Republican friends were dead wrong about the law. Notice how little we have heard about the ACA the closer and closer we get to the mid-term elections. Republicans bet the farm on opposing Obamacare and history will show that the entire party opposed a law that was the most significant piece of social legislation in a generation. As more and more good news about the law continues to emerge, Republicans will do their best to pretend like they never opposed the law in the first place. In fact, now Republican governors like Pennsylvania’s Tom Corbett are expanding Medicaid, and there are a handful of other states whose Republican governors are also considering doing the same. Governors like Rick Scott and Scott Walker, who openly denied their citizens Medicaid, are now facing the fight for their political lives.

Democrats have a tremendous opportunity to use Obamacare’s successes for the upcoming midterm elections. As the good news continues to pour in, Democrats should hammer their opponents, and especially sitting members of Congress, for continually using fear and propaganda to deny their constituents health care. For Democrats to win big in November, they need to continue to advocate for the people that the Affordable Care Act has helped the most: The working class. If Democrats can successfully appeal to this group and can honestly and openly say how Republicans continue to deny their fellow citizens health care out of political spite, then they should be able to successfully get people to the polls who are fed up with being consistently lied to and manipulated by the Republican Party.

If Democrats can do that, they will have made a compelling case for a blue House and Senate this fall.

93 Countries Who Have Changed Their Minds About Obama

  NEWS & POLITICS  

AlterNet / By Nicolas J.S. Davies

93 Countries Who Have Changed Their Minds About Obama

And 31 where he's less popular than George W. Bush—including Kenya.

April 29, 2014 

Photo Credit: Pete Souza, The Obama-Biden Transition Project (l) / Wikimedia Commons; yourecoveredinbees (r); Screenshot / YouTube.co

During the Bush years, people all over the world were horrified by America's aggression, human rights abuses and militarism. By 2008, only one in three people around the world approved of the job performance of U.S. leaders. The election of President Obama broadcast his message of hope and change far beyond U.S. shores, and Gallup's 2009 U.S.-Global Leadership Project (USGLP) recorded a sharp rise in global public approval of U.S. leadership to 49 percent.

As in the U.S., the reality of Obama's policies has gradually eroded global approval of his leadership, which dropped to 41 percent in 2012 before rebounding to 46 percent in 2013. The 2013 USGLP report includes a caveat that Europe and other areas were surveyed in early 2013, soon after Obama's reelection and beforerevelations of NSA wire-tapping, so the improved 2013 figures may reflect a fleeting revival of hope rather than a favorable response to U.S. policy.

A closer look at the U.S.-Global Leadership Project report reveals an erosion of approval for U.S. leadership in countries all over the world since 2009. The specific question Gallup asks is, "Do you approve or disapprove of the job performance of the leadership of the United States?" Large numbers in some countries refuse to answer or express no opinion, masking unvoiced disapproval behind fear, deference or politeness. I don't believe that 71 percent of Vietnamese really have no opinion of U.S. global leadership. But the approval figures are probably not as flawed as the disapproval ones.

In 2008, a majority of respondents approved of the job performance of U.S. leaders in only 30 out of 109 countries. After Obama's election, this jumped to 54 out of 112 or almost half the countries surveyed. But, in the 2013 report, only 37 percent, 48 out of 130, still had majorities who approved of U.S. leadership. Overall, the number of people who approve of U.S. leadership has declined in 93 countries since 2009, as the impact of Obama's policies has gradually displaced his iconic image in people's minds.* In 31 countries, Obama's leadership approval figures have sunk below Bush's.**

The most striking drops in approval of U.S. leadership have come in Africa, where U.S. leadership has always enjoyed its highest approval ratings. The continent's high hopes for Obama may partly account for lower approval in 28 out of 34 countries compared to his "honeymoon" in 2009. But that doesn't explain why people in 15 out of 27 countries, or most of the continent, now rate U.S. leadership under Obama worse than under Bush. That even includes Kenya, the home of the Obama family. The enthusiasm Obama's election generated in Kenya and the rest of Africa led Africans to pay greater attention to U.S. policy, but what they discovered has left them severely disillusioned.

Europe was the continent that most unequivocally rejected Bush's leadership. Only 18 percent of Europeans approved of U.S. leadership in 2008, with approval falling as low as 8 percent in Austria and Belgium and 6 percent in Spain. Obama's charm offensive was also more effective in Europe than anywhere else, boosting approval to 47 percent in 2009. This fell back to 34 percent by 2012, but recovered to 41 percent in early 2013. But Gallup surveyed Europe in 2013 before Edward Snowden's revelations of NSA spying, and before Assistant Secretary Nulandorganized a coup in Ukraine, turning it into the latest battlefield in the global American war that so alienated Europeans during the Bush administration. So we'll have to wait for the 2014 report for a read-out on Europe's reaction to mass wiretapping and "Fuck the E.U." regime change.

The approval rating of U.S. leadership in Asia varies a lot but has grown along with the region's economic growth, to 45 percent in 2013, also sweetening the global approval ratings. Latin America looks more like Europe, with a 34 percent rating in the Americas at the end of the Bush administration spiking to 53 percent in 2009, declining to 40 percent in 2013. Argentina rose from 11 percent in 2008 to 42 percent in 2009 but fell back to 19 percent in 2012 and 23 percent in 2013.

Barack Obama's 2008 campaign promises of hope and change have faded from the headlines around the world as they have in America. His foreign and military policy has conspicuously failed to make a clean break with the Bush policies that alienated so much of the human race. He has failed to close Guantanamo or to hold senior U.S. officials accountable for war crimes. He escalated the war in Afghanistan, where he has conducted 22,000 air strikes, along with hundreds of illegal drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. He has expanded special forces operations to an incredible 134 countriesand launched bloody proxy wars in Libya andSyria, reducing them to chaos and warlordism to rival Iraq and Afghanistan.

Obama has overseen an evolution in U.S. war policy from mass military occupations to a greater reliance on covert operations, proxy wars and a naval buildup in the Pacific. But this evolution was dictated by the failed occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and the rise of China rather than by any new vision Obama brought to U.S. policy. A President McCain would have followed roughly the same policy and likely committed many of the same crimes.

Obama's global charm offensive was always more about style than substance, and the substance behind the mask of "change" was "continuity.” Neither the American nor the global public would have submitted quietly to another George W. Bush. So the challenge for the power brokers of America's capitalist political system in 2008 was to find and promote a face and a voice that a jaded public would welcome but who would ensure continuity for Wall Street's control of the economy and America's relentless but ever more elusive quest for global military dominance. The pretense of change was essential to sidetrack and silence growing demands for actual changes in U.S. policy.

This was the challenge that defined Obama's inherently deceptive role as the new CEO of America Incorporated. How to change public perceptions without changing the underlying policies that they were based on? The U.S.-Global Leadership Project explicitly defines itself as a tool in such efforts. Its introduction reads, "The (USGLP) gives public- and private-sector leaders a better understanding of what is driving global views of U.S. leadership, creates a context for collaboration on how to improve those views, and enhances U.S. public and private global engagement efforts."

But the report does not suggest fundamental changes in U.S. policy. The authors implicitly accept that the views of the people they are polling have no voice in such matters. But U.S. leaders must "engage" with them to manufacture consent and minimize resistance to U.S. policy. This was precisely what American power brokers hired Barack Obama to do, and the USGLP is a useful report card on his performance.

The parameters of post-Cold War U.S. foreign policy were first defined in 1992, to provide a stable and predictable framework for "public- and private-sector leaders" to exploit the power dividend gained by the collapse of the Soviet Union. They were spelled out in a "Defense Planning Guidance" document drafted by Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy Paul Wolfowitz and his assistant Scooter Libby, which was leaked to the New York Times in March 1992. The document was substantially revised to obscure its globally offensive implications before it was officially released a month later. But the policy framework outlined by Wolfowitz in 1992 was later codified in the Clinton administration's 1997 Quadrennial Defense Review and the 2002National Security Strategy, which Senator Edward Kennedy described as "a call for 21st-century American imperialism that no other nation can or should accept."

The policy Wolfowitz outlined in 1992 was to establish a world order in which the U.S. military would be so dominant and so ready to use overwhelming force that "potential competitors" would be discouraged "from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role." Even NATO allies would be discouraged from acting independently of the U.S. or forming European security arrangements outside NATO. Once this policy was established, the U.S. would "sufficiently account for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order."

The 1992 "Defense Planning Guidance" implicitly violated the U.N. Charter's prohibition on the threat or use of force by threatening unilateral U.S. military force against "potential competitors." As the New York Times noted at the time, "the Pentagon document articulates the clearest rejection to date of collective internationalism, the strategy that emerged from World War II when the five victorious powers sought to form a United Nations that could mediate disputes and police outbreaks of violence."

During the Bush administration, the "neoconservative" political philosophy of Wolfowitz, Libby and their cabal came out of the shadows and became a target of widespread public criticism. The roots of U.S. aggression against Iraq were traced to the neoconservative "Project for the New American Century," founded in 1997 by Robert Kagan and William Kristol, the editor of the Murdoch-funded Weekly Standard. Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Libby were all PNAC members.

But the role of Kagan's wife, Victoria Nuland, as the leader of the State Department/CIA team that organized the U.S. coup in Ukraine has drawn new attention to the fact that the neocons still hold positions of power and influence in Washington under Obama. The neocons today are not just influencing policy as an outside pressure group as they did with their "Team B" in the 1970s and PNAC in the 1990s. They remain comfortably ensconced in Obama's State Department, the CIA, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and corporate-funded Washington think-tanks.

Victoria Nuland was Deputy National Security Adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney and then U.S. Ambassador to NATO. Hilary Clinton installed her as State Department spokesperson, and then John Kerry appointed her as Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs. Her husband, PNAC co-founder Robert Kagan, works at the Brookings Institution, and he and Kristol have now co-founded the Foreign Policy Initiative, widely seen as the successor to PNAC and lampooned as, "The Project for the Rehabilitation of Neoconservatism."

But Robert Kagan doesn't seem to need rehabilitating. President Obama prepared for his State of the Union speech in January 2012 by studying Kagan's essay, "The Myth of American Decline" and discussing it paragraph by paragraph with network news anchors at a White House meeting. In contrast to the USGLP report, Kagan's essay completely fails to consider the point of view of anybody outside America, but of course that's not necessary in a propaganda piece for an American audience. Obama drew heavily on the essay in his speech, climaxing with a cheap applause line based on Kagan's wishful thinking, "Anyone who tells you that America is in decline, or that our influence has waned, doesn't know what they're talking about."

Anther neocon with influence in the Obama administration is Kagan's brother Frederick.Frederick Kagan is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and his wife Kimberlyis president of the Institute for the Study of War. They were among the principal advocates of escalation in Afghanistan in 2009 and their close relationships with Secretary Gates and Generals Petraeus and McChrystal gave them critical influence in Obama's decision to escalate and prolong the war.

Former PNAC director Bruce Jackson is the president of the Project on Transitional Democracies, dedicated to integrating Eastern Europe into the EU and NATO. Reuell Marc Gerecht, of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and a former CIA officer in Iran, is one of the most strident voices in Washington urging U.S. aggression against Syria and Iran and working to torpedo diplomatic solutions to either crisis.

Carl Gershman and Vin Weber are president and chairman respectively of the National Endowment for Democracy, which laid the groundwork for the coup in Ukraine, spending more than $3.4 billion of our tax dollars on 85 projects there. Ron Paul has called NED, "an organization that uses U.S. tax money to actually subvert democracy, by showering funding on favored political parties or movements overseas."

But the influence of neoconservatism extends well beyond the cabal of neocons who rode in with the Bush administration. Despite failing every test in their application to the real world for 22 years, the policy framework and goals developed by Paul Wolfowitz in 1992 have become set in stone throughout Democratic and Republican administrations alike. The goal of U.S. military supremacy has become such an article of faith that rational alternatives are viewed as sacrilege or treason.

As Gabriel Kolko noted in "Century of War" in 1994, "options and decisions that are intrinsically dangerous and irrational become not only plausible but the only form of reasoning about war and diplomacy that is possible in official circles." There are no limits to the crimes that American exceptionalism can justify, and genuine compliance with the rule of law is viewed as an unthinkable existential threat to the new premises of American power.

The only way a government can maintain such an illegitimate position is by the most elaborate use of propaganda, deception and secrecy, both against its own people and the rest of the world. The Obama model has evolved beyond traditional propaganda with techniques of branding and image-making developed in the corporate public relations sector, not least to build a deep sense of trust into the iconic image of a hip, sophisticated president with strong roots in African-American and modern urban culture. The contrast between image and reality, which is such an essential element in Obama's role, represents a new achievement in "managed democracy," enabling him to continue and expand policies that are the polar opposite of the change his supporters thought they were voting for.

But this regime of secrecy, deception and propaganda is an essential feature of the neoconservative political philosophy that now drives the leadership of both major political parties. Leo Strauss, the intellectual godfather of the neocons, was a refugee from 1930s Germany who believed that any genuine effort to achieve "government of the people, by the people, for the people" was doomed to end as the Weimar Republic did in Germany with the rise of Hitler and the Nazis. Strauss had a very dark Hobbesian view of human nature, which he justified with "secret" meanings he claimed were hidden in the works of Plato, Nietzsche and all philosophers. Strauss did not believe that the general public could handle the truth as he saw it, so that any system in which the public held real power would surely end in barbarism.

The Straussian solution to this imaginary problem is a system of "managed democracy," in which a privileged high priesthood or oligarchy monopolizes real power as it oversees a superficial structure of democracy and promotes patriotic and religious myths to ensure the loyalty of the public and the cohesion of society. Political scientist Sheldon Wolin has dubbed this "inverted totalitarianism." Because it is less openly offensive than "classical totalitarianism,” the inverted form may be more sustainable and therefore more successful in achieving a total concentration of wealth and power, paradoxically making it more insidious and dangerous than the classical totalitarianism the Straussians claim to be saving us from.

In her 1997 book, Leo Strauss and the American Right, Shadia Drury wrote, 

Strauss believes that every culture and its morality are human fabrications designed by philosophers and other creative geniuses for the preservation of the herd. Because the truth is dark and sordid, Strauss maintains that the philosophic love of truth must remain the hidden preserve of the very few. But in their public posture, philosophers must pay lip service to the myths and illusions they have fabricated for the many. They must champion the immutability of truth, the universality of justice, and the selfless nature of goodness, while secretly teaching their acolytes that all truth is fabrication, that justice is doing good to friends and evil to enemies, and that the only good is one's own pleasure. The truth must be deliciously savored by the few, but it is surely dangerous for the consumption of the many.

If this sounds uncannily like the cynical attitude of the people who run America today, it is because we are now living under a neoconservative, Straussian political system, and President Obama, far from representing some sort of alternative, is a neoconservative, Straussian president. In fact, by drawing on the sensibility and tools of Hollywood and the advertising industry to carefully balance traditional appeals to patriotism and religiosity with urban identity politics and inclusive and populist rhetoric, Obama and the Clintons are more sophisticated and masterful practitioners of Straussian politics than Bush or Cheney ever were.

The 2013 U.S.-Global Leadership Project report is the latest evidence that you can fool all the people some of the time and some people all the time, but you can't fool all the people all the time. And yet fooling all the people all the time is precisely the Straussian model for American politics and government. Behind a smokescreen of democracy and American values, a capitalist political system recycles wealth into political power and vice versa. Behind a consumerist American Dream, a corporate command economy drives a concentration of wealth and power such as 20th-century totalitarians never imagined, supported by a corresponding explosion of poverty, debt and mass criminalization. And behind an endlessly waving flag, a militarized foreign policy wrecks country after country in the name of democracy.

If Leo Strauss was right, the American people will passively accept a diet of endless propaganda and deception fed to us by a wealthy, powerful high priesthood as they gorge themselves on the fruits of our labor. If he was wrong, we will reject Straussian politics, organize effectively to elect a very different political class, and ensure that they democratically represent us to build the better world we all know is possible. But the problems facing the world today will not wait very long for us to make up our minds whether Leo Strauss was right or wrong in his dark, disdainful view of who we are.

___________________

* Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Angola, Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bolivia, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Chile, Colombia, Congo Brazzaville, Congo Kinshasa, Costa Rica, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Djibouti, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Finland, France, Germany, Ghana, Greece, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Ireland, Israel, Ivory Coast, Japan, Kenya, Kosovo, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Liberia, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Madagascar, Malawi, Malaysia, Mali, Mexico, Moldova, Mongolia, Montenegro, Morocco, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Niger, Nigeria, Palestine, Panama, Peru, Russia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Slovenia, Somaliland, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Tanzania, Thailand, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uganda, United Kingdom, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Vietnam, Yemen, Zambia, Zimbabwe.

** Afghanistan, Armenia, Chad, Colombia, Congo Brazzaville, Djibouti, Ghana, Guatemala, Honduras, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Kenya, Laos, Lebanon, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Nicaragua, Nigeria, the Philippines, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Uganda, Vietnam, Zimbabwe.  

Nicolas J. S. Davies is the author of "Blood On Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq." Davies also wrote the chapter on "Obama At War" for the book, "Grading the 44th President: A Report Card on Barack Obama's First Term as a Progressive Leader."

BP Gets an Anniversary Gift From the Obama Administration

Published on Saturday, April 19, 2014 by Common Dreams

BP Gets an Anniversary Gift From the Obama Administration

 

by Richard Schiffman

 

 

This Sunday April 20th is the fourth anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon explosion, which killed 11 workers and dumped over 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico over a three month period in 2010.





You wouldn't think that the London-based company that spilled the oil would get an anniversary gift from the federal government. But the Environmental Protection Agency has just given BP a big one. The EPA ruled that the corporation could start bidding on lucrative new oil leases in the Gulf of Mexico after having been suspended from doing any new business with the government ever since the accident.

That suspension was lifted on March 13th less than a week before the yearly government auction for drilling rights. The company whose negligence was responsible for the worst marine oil-spill in history won 43 new leases in the Gulf that is still fouled by million of gallons of unrecovered crude.

The Deepwater Horizon disaster was not the first time that BP was found culpable in a major accident. In 2005 the company was deemed criminally liable for a refinery explosion in Texas City which killed 15 people. Yet again in 2006, a Justice Department investigation found that BP had willfully ignored evidence of serious corrosion in its pipeline, which led in Alaska to the largest oil spill ever in the Arctic.

BP's critics say this was not just a run of bad luck, but the result of an ingrained corporate culture which routinely put profits above safety. In an interview, Tyson Slocum of the public interest group Public Citizen said: "If ordinary people are found guilty in three felony cases, they will be imprisoned-- suspension from contracts is a kind of corporate imprisonment."

However, under intense pressure from BP, which filed a lawsuit challenging the contract ban, and the British government, which filed a brief in the case criticizing the US for its action, the company was just granted a get-out-of-jail-free card by the Obama administration.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the head of the EPA suspension and debarment office which ordered the original ban against the oil giant, "retired" just days after the administration caved to BP's demand to end their 5-year criminal probation period early.

After the Gulf oil spill, there were calls in the environmental community and in Congress to reform the outdated regulatory system. "The last time that regulations for offshore drilling were written," says Slocum “was 1978. Deepwater wells, like the Deepwater Horizon were introduced in 1994. So what you've got is regulations for the typewriter age applying to IPhones."

In the aftermath of the disaster, Congress passed a bill in the summer of 2010 which called for a comprehensive reorganization of the Offshore Oil Agency, and for tougher new environmental standards. But, under pressure from the American Petroleum Institute that bill died in the Senate.

The Obama administration then took matters into its own hands calling for a temporary moratorium on drilling. By executive decree, the President reintroduced many of the same rules that had been included in the ill-fated bill. These rules, however, do not have the force of law and can be reversed by future administrations.

Moreover, the central problem, according to Slocum, remains: "Remember, we all watched in horror over a period of two and a half months how one of the largest and most profitable multinationals on the planet with some of the smartest engineers in the world had absolutely no idea how to cap that well... We still do not have clear certification that any driller-- whether they be BP or Exxon or Shell-- has the right equipment and the proven technology to stop a deepwater blowout."

Slocum says drillers need to be required by law to have equipment on hand to drill a relief well in case of a future blowout. And we also need to require companies to thoroughly test in advance critical equipment-- like the faulty blowout protector which malfunctioned to cause the Deepwater Horizon accident.

However, we're unlikely to get these critical regulations anytime soon. The American Petroleum Institute has said that they will oppose any efforts to impose new regulations on offshore drilling. One of the wealthiest and most powerful lobbies in Washington, the API generally gets what it asks for.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

 

Richard Schiffman is the author of two books and a former journalist whose work has appeared in, amongst other outlets, the New York Times and on a variety of National Public Radio shows including Morning Edition and All Things Considered.