April 17, 2011

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Last week, President Obama offered a spirited defense of his party’s values — in effect, of the legacy of the New Deal and the Great Society. Immediately thereafter, as always happens when Democrats take a stand, the civility police came out in force. The president, we were told, was being too partisan; he needs to treat his opponents with respect; he should have lunch with them, and work out a consensus.

That’s a bad idea. Equally important, it’s an undemocratic idea.

Let’s review the story so far.

Two weeks ago, House Republicans released their big budget proposal, selling it to credulous pundits as a statement of necessity, not ideology — a document telling America What Must Be Done.

But it was, in fact, a deeply partisan document, which you might have guessed from the opening sentence: “Where the president has failed, House Republicans will lead.” It hyped the danger of deficits, yet even on its own (not at all credible) accounting, spending cuts were used mainly to pay for tax cuts rather than deficit reduction. The transparent and obvious goal was to use deficit fears to impose a vision of small government and low taxes, especially on the wealthy.

So the House budget proposal revealed a yawning gap between the two parties’ priorities. And it revealed a deep difference in views about how the world works.

When the proposal was released, it was praised as a “wonk-approved” plan that had been run by the experts. But the “experts” in question, it turned out, were at the Heritage Foundation, and few people outside the hard right found their conclusions credible. In the words of the consulting firm Macroeconomic Advisers — which makes its living telling businesses what they need to know, not telling politicians what they want to hear — the Heritage analysis was “both flawed and contrived.” Basically, Heritage went all in on the much-refuted claim that cutting taxes on the wealthy produces miraculous economic results, including a surge in revenue that actually reduces the deficit.

By the way, Heritage is always like this. Whenever there’s something the G.O.P. doesn’t like — say, environmental protection — Heritage can be counted on to produce a report, based on no economic model anyone else recognizes, claiming that this policy would cause huge job losses. Correspondingly, whenever there’s something Republicans want, like tax cuts for the wealthy or for corporations, Heritage can be counted on to claim that this policy would yield immense economic benefits.

The point is that the two parties don’t just live in different moral universes, they also live in different intellectual universes, with Republicans in particular having a stable of supposed experts who reliably endorse whatever they propose.

So when pundits call on the parties to sit down together and talk, the obvious question is, what are they supposed to talk about? Where’s the common ground?

Eventually, of course, America must choose between these differing visions. And we have a way of doing that. It’s called democracy.

Now, Republicans claim that last year’s midterms gave them a mandate for the vision embodied in their budget. But last year the G.O.P. ran against what it called the “massive Medicare cuts” contained in the health reform law. How, then, can the election have provided a mandate for a plan that not only would preserve all of those cuts, but would go on, over time, to dismantle Medicare completely?

For what it’s worth, polls suggest that the public’s priorities are nothing like those embodied in the Republican budget. Large majorities support higher, not lower, taxes on the wealthy. Large majorities — including a majority of Republicans — also oppose major changes to Medicare. Of course, the poll that matters is the one on Election Day. But that’s all the more reason to make the 2012 election a clear choice between visions.

Which brings me to those calls for a bipartisan solution. Sorry to be cynical, but right now “bipartisan” is usually code for assembling some conservative Democrats and ultraconservative Republicans — all of them with close ties to the wealthy, and many who are wealthy themselves — and having them proclaim that low taxes on high incomes and drastic cuts in social insurance are the only possible solution.

This would be a corrupt, undemocratic way to make decisions about the shape of our society even if those involved really were wise men with a deep grasp of the issues. It’s much worse when many of those at the table are the sort of people who solicit and believe the kind of policy analyses that the Heritage Foundation supplies.

So let’s not be civil. Instead, let’s have a frank discussion of our differences. In particular, if Democrats believe that Republicans are talking cruel nonsense, they should say so — and take their case to the voters.

To breathe the true air of freedom and democracy you need independent media lungs. Staffed with journalists and political observers not beholden to the status quo.
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By Patrick Martin, WSWS>ORG
14 April 2011

President Barack Obama outlined plans Wednesday for slashing $4 trillion from the federal budget deficit over the next 12 years, the bulk of it by cutting domestic social spending, particularly in the area of health care.

His speech at George Washington University in the US capital demonstrates the consensus in the American ruling elite for a frontal assault on social programs upon which tens of millions of working people, children and retirees depend.

Obama largely accepted the deficit reduction framework set by the Republican right. But he proposed a different mix of spending cuts, as well as calling for tax increases on the wealthy, something that the leaders of the Republican-controlled House of Representatives have ruled out in advance.

The proposed tax hikes are extremely modest, merely allowing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy to expire at the end of 2012 and restoring the tax rates that prevailed under the Clinton administration. The promise, moreover, is an empty one. Obama caved in to Republican opposition to raising taxes on the rich last year, when the Democrats still controlled both houses of Congress. Why should anyone believe he will act differently now?

Throughout the speech, Obama sought to appeal to two diametrically opposed audiences. He sought to reassure global financial markets and the US ruling elite of his commitment to reaching bipartisan agreement on drastic and immediate spending cuts. And he sought to delude working people about both the causes of the fiscal crisis and the devastating consequences of the measures now being prepared in Washington.

For his ruling class audience, Obama spelled out proposals for spending cuts in Medicare and other social programs that would previously have been considered unthinkable from a Democrat in the White House.

According to a summary posted on the White House web site, these include:

• Massive cuts in domestic discretionary spending, from the baseline set by last Friday’s agreement with congressional Republicans that slashes $38.5 billion from spending for the current fiscal year. The total in spending cuts over 12 years would come to $770 billion in areas like education, the environment, transportation and other infrastructure, and in wages and benefits for federal government workers.

• An additional $360 billion over 12 years in cuts in mandatory domestic programs, so called because they provide benefit payments that are mandated under federal law, including farm subsidies, federal pension insurance, food stamps, home heating assistance and income-support programs for the poor and disabled.

• A further $480 billion over 12 years in cuts in federal health care spending, on top of the $1 trillion in cost-cutting already imposed to pay for the health care overhaul passed last year by a Democratic Congress. Obama outlined a series of policy changes in health care that he said would cut an additional $1 trillion in the decade after 2023.

• In the event that spending cuts fail to reduce the federal deficit to the desired proportion of the US gross domestic product by 2014, Obama would establish a debt failsafe mechanism that would trigger across-the-board spending cuts and tax increases, likely to include a national sales tax or European-style Value Added Tax.

• Cuts of $400 billion in military spending over 12 years, less than four percent of the gargantuan sum that the Pentagon, Department of Energy, Department of Homeland Security, CIA and other agencies will spend during that period on the armed forces, nuclear weapons and intelligence and security operations.

For his popular audience, Obama delivered a series of demagogic assaults on the Republican Party and the deficit reduction plan unveiled last week by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, which the House is expected to approve on Friday.

He explained that the Republican plan “is less about reducing the deficit than it is about changing the basic social compact in America.” He said that it “ends Medicare as we know it,” and would lead to the loss of health insurance for up to 50 million Americans now covered by Medicaid or scheduled to be enrolled in private insurance plans under Obama’s Affordable Care Act of 2010.

For Medicare recipients, he said, the Republican plan means “instead of guaranteed health care, you will get a voucher.” He continued: “And if that voucher isn’t worth enough to buy insurance, tough luck—you’re on your own.” Grandparents who cannot afford nursing home care, poor children, and children disabled by autism or Down’s syndrome would be told “to fend for themselves.”

Given the emphasis on health care cost controls both in last year’s “reform” legislation and in his speech Wednesday, Obama’s supposed outrage over Republican heartlessness is cynical and insincere. The two big business parties, the Democrats as much as the Republicans, seek to cut the cost of health care for American corporations and the government by placing more and more of the burden on working people, including the sick, the disabled and the destitute.

Even more deceptive was Obama’s explanation of the source of the fiscal crisis. He contrasted the 1990s—when “our leaders came together three times… to reduce our nation’s deficit” in bipartisan agreements under the first President Bush and the Clinton administration—to the decade after 2000, when “we lost our way.”

In this potted history, “America’s finances were in great shape by the year 2000. We went from deficit to surplus.” Then the administration of George W. Bush waged two wars, established a Medicare prescription drug benefit, and cut taxes for the wealthy, wrecking the “fiscal discipline” of the previous decade.

One small thing is left out of this account: the long-term crisis of American capitalism, culminating in the Wall Street crash of 2008 and the trillions expended by the Treasury and the Federal Reserve to bail out the banks. The financial catastrophe precipitated the worst economic slump since the Great Depression—which continues to this day, although Obama barely mentioned it in his 43-minute speech.

The conditions that produced the 2008 crash go back at least three decades, and include the increasing subordination of production to financial manipulation, the deregulation of financial markets, and colossal growth of economic inequality.

Obama made only one fleeting reference to this most important aspect of the economic crisis. He condemned the Ryan plan for proposing another $1 trillion in tax breaks for the wealthy, then added:

“In the last decade, the average income of the bottom 90 percent of all working Americans actually declined. The top 1 percent saw their income rise by an average of more than a quarter of a million dollars each.”

He then asked rhetorically, “And that’s who needs to pay less taxes? They want to give people like me a $200,000 tax cut that’s paid for by asking 33 seniors to each pay $6,000 more in health costs. That’s not right, and it’s not going to happen as long as I’m president.”

This was the high point of Obama’s populist demagogy, a typical dog-and-pony show in which the Democrats pretend to be the tribunes of the common man and the Republicans are assigned the role of Wall Street stooges.

A little over an hour after Obama’s address, three top House Republicans did their part in the play-acting, going before press microphones and practically snarling their hostility to the president’s whipping up of “class war.”

“Class war” is an accurate term for the program of both the Democrats and Republicans. However vituperative the mutual mudslinging, both parties represent corporate America and do the bidding of the super-rich. The leading personnel of both parties consist of individuals, like Obama, who are themselves multi-millionaires.

The US ruling elite is taking advantage of the fact that the working class is politically disenfranchised and the old union organizations have been transformed into instruments of corporate management for imposing wage and benefit cuts. It is moving aggressively to return working people to conditions of exploitation unseen in America in nearly a century.

For the past few months, state and local governments, both Republican and Democratic, have taken the leading role in these attacks, sparking the confrontation with public employees in Wisconsin and increasingly bitter conflicts throughout the country.

It was noticeable that in Obama’s lengthy speech there was no reference whatsoever to the financial crisis wracking state and local government and the devastating cuts being imposed on social services, jobs, wages, benefits and pensions.

For two years, the stimulus legislation passed in 2009 provided limited support to state and local government finances. This period has come to an end, and there will be no further federal support. On the contrary, as the positions of both the congressional Republicans and the Obama White House demonstrate, the federal government is now set to play the leading role in the assault on the social rights of working people.

The working class should reject the entire framework of the official deficit-reduction debate. The Democratic and Republican politicians who claim there is “no money” for necessities like pensions, health care and education represent a corporate elite sitting on countless trillions in wealth.

The working class alternative to capitalist austerity must be the expropriation of this hoarded wealth, accumulated from the labor of workers, and the reorganization of economic life to serve human needs, not corporate profits.

This means the building of an independent mass political party of the working class based on a socialist and anti-imperialist program.

PATRICK MARTIN is a senior political analyst with the World Socialist Web Site.

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1 April 2011 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal – ZSpace

The entire Libyan conflict of the last month — the civil war in Libya, the US-led military action against Gaddafi — is neither about humanitarian intervention nor about the immediate supply of world oil. It is in fact one big distraction — a deliberate distraction — from the principal political struggle in the Arab world. There is one thing on which Gaddafi and Western leaders of all political views are in total accord. They all want to slow down, channel, co-opt, limit the second Arab revolt and prevent it from changing the basic political realities of the Arab world and its role in the geopolitics of the world-system.To appreciate this, one has to follow what has been happening in chronological sequence. Although political rumblings in the various Arab states and the attempts by various outside forces to support one or another element within various states have been a constant for a long time, the suicide of Mohamed Bouazizi on December 17, 2010 launched a very different process.

It was in my view the continuation of the spirit of the world revolution of 1968. In 1968, as in the last few months in the Arab world, the group that had the courage and the will to launch the protest against instituted authority were young people. They were motivated by many things: the arbitrariness and cruelty and corruption of those in authority, their own worsening economic situation, and above all the insistence on their moral and political right to be a major part of determining their own political and cultural destiny. They have also been protesting against the whole structure of the world-system and the ways in which their leaders have been subordinated to the pressures of outside forces.

These young people were not organised, at least at first. And they were not always totally cognisant of the political scene. But they have been courageous. And, as in 1968, their actions were contagious. Very soon, in virtually every Arab state, without distinction as to foreign policy, they have threatened the established order. When they showed their strength in Egypt, still the key Arab state, everyone began to take them seriously. There are two ways of taking such a revolt seriously. One is to join it and try thereby to control it. And one is to take strong measures to quash it. Both have been tried.

There were three groups who joined it, underlined by Samir Amin in his analysis of Egypt: the traditional and revived left, the middle-class professionals and the Islamists. The strength and character of these groups has varied in each of the Arab countries. Amin saw the left and the middle-class professionals (to the extent that they were nationalist and not transnational neoliberals) as positive elements and the Islamists, the last to get on the bandwagon, as negative elements. And then there is the army, always the bastion of order, which joined the Egyptian revolt late, precisely in order to limit its effect.

Libya and intervention

So, when the uprising began in Libya, it was the direct result of the success of the revolts in the two neighbouring countries, Tunisia and Egypt. Gaddafi is a particularly ruthless leader and has been making horrific statements about what he would do to traitors. If, very soon, there were strong voices in France, Great Britain and the United States to intervene militarily, it was scarcely because Gaddafi was an anti-imperialist thorn in their side. He sold his oil willingly to the West and he boasted of the fact that he helped Italy stem the tide of illegal immigration. He offered lucrative arrangements for Western business.

The intervention camp had two components: those for whom any and all military interventions by the West are irresistible, and those who argued the case for humanitarian intervention. They were opposed very strongly in the United States by the military, who saw a Libyan war as unwinnable and an enormous military strain on the United States. The latter group seemed to be winning out, when suddenly the resolution of the Arab League changed the balance of forces.

How did this happen? The Saudi government worked very hard and effectively to get a resolution passed endorsing the institution of a no-fly zone. In order to get unanimity among the Arab states, the Saudis made two concessions. The demand was only for a no-fly zone and a second resolution was adopted opposing the intrusion of any Western land forces.

Saudi role

What led the Saudis to push this through? Did someone from the United States telephone someone in Saudi Arabia and request this? I think it was quite the opposite. This was an instance of the Saudis trying to affect US policy rather than the other way around. And it worked. It tipped the balance.

What the Saudis wanted, and what they got, was a big distraction from what they thought most urgent, and what they were doing — a crackdown on the Arab revolt, as it affected first of all Saudi Arabia itself, then the Gulf states, then elsewhere in the Arab world.

As in 1968, this kind of anti-authority revolt creates strange splits in the countries affected, and creates unexpected alliances. The call for humanitarian intervention is particularly divisive. The problem I have with humanitarian intervention is that I’m never sure it is humanitarian. Advocates always point to the cases where such intervention didn’t occur, such as Rwanda. But they never look at the cases where it did occur. Yes, in the relatively short run, it can prevent what would otherwise be a slaughter of people. But in the longer run, does it really do this? To prevent Saddam Hussein’s short-run slaughters, the United States invaded Iraq. Have fewer people been slaughtered as a result over a 10-year period? It doesn’t seem so.

Advocates seem to have a quantitative criterion. If a government kills 10 protesters, this is ‘normal’ if perhaps worthy of verbal criticism. If it kills 10,000, this is criminal, and requires humanitarian intervention. How many people have to be killed before what is normal becomes criminal? 100, 1000?

Today, the Western powers are launched on a Libyan war, with an uncertain outcome. It will probably be a morass. Has it succeeded in distracting the world from the ongoing Arab revolt? Perhaps.We don’t know yet. Will it succeed in ousting Gaddafi? Perhaps.We don’t know yet. If Gaddafi goes, what will succeed him? Even US spokespeople are worrying about the possibility that he will be replaced either with his old cronies or with al Qaeda, or with both.

The US military action in Libya is a mistake, even from the narrow point of view of the United States, and even from the point of view of being humanitarian. It won’t end soon. President Obama has explained his actions in a very complicated, subtle way. What he has said essentially is that if the president of the United States, in his careful judgement, deems an intervention in the interests of the United States and the world, he can and should do it. I do not doubt that he agonised over his decision. But that is not good enough. It’s a terrible, ominous and ultimately self-defeating proposition.

In the meantime, the best hope of everyone is that the second Arab revolt renews steam — perhaps a long shot now — and shakes first of all the Saudis.”

Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein (born September 28, 1930, New York City) is an American sociologist, historical social scientist, and world-systems analyst. His bimonthly commentaries on world affairs are syndicated[1].