Source: Truthdig via The Nation
Credits: Robert Scheer
Dated: 2012-01-26

Obama's Faux Populism Sounds Like Bill Clinton

I’ll admit it: Listening to Barack Obama, I am ready to enlist in his campaign against the feed-the-rich Republicans... until I recall that I once responded in the same way to Bill Clinton’s faux populism. And then I get angry because betrayal by the “good guys” for whom I have ended up voting has become the norm.

Yes, betrayal, because if Obama meant what he said in Tuesday’s State of the Union address about holding the financial industry responsible for its scams, why did he appoint the old Clinton crowd that had legalized those scams to the top economic posts in his administration? Why did he hire Timothy Geithner, who has turned the Treasury Department into a concierge service for Wall Street tycoons?

Why hasn’t he pushed for a restoration of the Glass-Steagall Act, which Clinton’s deregulation reversed? Does the president really believe that the Dodd-Frank slap-on-the-wrist sellout represents “new rules to hold Wall Street accountable, so a crisis like this never happens again”? Can he name one single too-big-to-fail banking monstrosity that has been reduced in size on his watch instead of encouraged to grow ever larger by Treasury and Fed bailouts and interest-free money?

When Obama declared Tuesday evening “no American company should be able to avoid paying its fair share of taxes by moving jobs and profits overseas,” wasn’t he aware that Jeffrey Immelt, the man he appointed to head his jobs council, is the most egregious offender? Immelt, the CEO of GE, heads a company with most of its workers employed in foreign countries, a corporation that makes 82 percent of its profit abroad and has paid no US taxes in the past three years.

It was also a bit bizarre for Obama to celebrate Steve Jobs as a model entrepreneur when the manufacturing jobs that the late Apple CEO created are in the same China that elsewhere in his speech the president sought to scapegoat for America’s problems. Apple, in its latest report on the subject, takes pride in attempting to limit the company’s overseas suppliers to a maximum workweek of sixty hours for their horribly exploited employees. Isn’t it weird to be chauvinistically China baiting when that country carries much of our debt?

I’m also getting tired of the exhortations to improve the nation’s schools, certainly a worthy endeavor, but this economic crisis is the result not of high school dropouts as Obama suggested, but rather the corruption of the best and brightest graduates of our elite academies. As Obama well knows from his own trajectory in the meritocracy, which took him from one of the most privileged schools in otherwise educationally depressed Hawaii to Harvard Law, the folks who concocted the mathematical formulas and wrote the laws justifying fraudulent collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps were his overachieving professors and classmates.

If he doesn’t know that, he should check out the record of Lawrence Summers, the man he picked to guide his economic program and who had been rewarded with the presidency of Harvard after having engineered Clinton’s deregulatory deal with Wall Street.

That is the real legacy of the Clinton years, and it is no surprise that GOP presidential contender Newt Gingrich has been campaigning on his rightful share of it. The international trade agreements that exported good US jobs, the radical financial deregulation that unleashed Wall Street greed and the free market zealotry of then-Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, who was reappointed by Clinton, were all part of a deal Clinton made with Gingrich, House speaker at that time.

As Gingrich put it in the first Republican debate in South Carolina: “As Speaker...working with President Bill Clinton, we passed a very Reagan-like program, less regulation, lower taxes.” Even the 15 percent tax break that Mitt Romney exploited for his carryover private equity income was a result of the unholy Clinton-Gingrich alliance. Both principals of that alliance were pimps for the financial industry, and that includes Freddie Mac, the for-profit stock-traded housing agency that Clinton coddled while it stoked the Ponzi scheme in housing and that rewarded the former speaker with $1.6 million to $1.8 million in consulting fees.

There were, finally, some bold words in Obama’s speech about helping beleaguered homeowners, but they ring hollow given this administration’s efforts to broker a sweetheart deal between the leading banks and the state attorneys general that would see the banks fined only a pittance for their responsibility in the mortgage meltdown. Obama could have had success demanding mortgage relief if he had made that a condition for bailing out the banks. Now the banksters know he’s firing blanks, and they are placing their bets on their more reliable Republican allies to prevent any significant demand for helping homeowners with their underwater mortgages.

Of course, Romney, Obama’s most likely opponent in the general election, will never challenge the Wall Street hold on Washington, since he is the personification of the vulture capitalism that is the true cause of America’s decline. Obama should shine in comparison with his Republican challenger, but there is little in his State of the Union speech to suggest he will chart a much-needed new course in his second term.

Robert Scheer is a contributing editor to The Nation, editor of Truthdig.com and author of The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street (Nation Books).

Source: The Nation
Credits: John Nichols
Dated: 2012-02-03

Why Is Paul Ryan So Angry About Reduced Unemployment?

[ Emilie says : By any realistic estimate of unemployment and underemployment, America's unemployment rate is closer to 20% than 10%. Political and media claims to the contrary notwithstanding. See article below. ]

For the past several years, House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan has complained that the US economy has been growing at too slow a rate.

Now, as unemployment rates drop and job creation seems finally to be accelerating, Ryan is suddenly fretting about the prospect that the economy might grow too quickly.

Why?

The answer has nothing to do with economics and everything to do with politics.

Despite the steady—make that unrelenting—opposition of Ryan and other leaders of the Republican-controlled US House, the Obama administration can now point to a pattern of monthly decreases in the unemployment rate. While the administration’s response to the unemployment crisis of the past three years was less than it should have been, a combination of stimulus policies and investments, as well as the determination of the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates low, appears to be working. For the fifth straight month, unemployment has fallen. The rate now stands at 8.3 percent—down from 10 percent in October 2009.

The official unemployment rate is now at the lowest point since the first months of Barack Obama’s presidency.

But it is the pattern of decrease that matters politically.

Consider this historical detail. At the start of 1984, after several years of brutal hard times, unemployment had fallen to 8.3 percent. The economy was still unsteady, especially in the manufacturing towns of the Great Lakes region and much of the South, but there was little question that the unemployment rate was falling. As more people got jobs during 1984, the rate continued to decline. It was this pattern that Ronald Reagan’s re-election campaign pointed to in television advertising that celebrated “morning in America.” The sense that the country was on the right track—even if it had not arrived—contributed mightily to Reagan’s landslide re-election win that fall.

Could Barack Obama be headed for the same sort of improvement in his political fortunes? In 1983, Reagan’s approval rating in Wall Street Journal polling had dipped below 40 percent, and at the start of 1984, it was hovering in the low mid-40s. Obama’s approval rating never went as low as Reagan’s, and it now is 48 percent in the WSJ/NBC News polling.

If unemployment continues to decline, Obama would seem to be well positioned to run his own “morning in America” campaign this fall.

That’s good news for Obama, and perhaps for the Democrats aligned with him. That’s not such good news for the Republican opposition.

Washington Republicans, who have blocked the president’s economic initiatives over the past year (even going so far as to threaten extensions of unemployment benefits), had been planning to run against Obama and the Democrats with a 2012 campaign claiming that current policies are not working.

But what if they are working?

Perhaps this explains Paul Ryan’s sudden objection to maintaining the current policies of the Federal Reserve.

Over the past year, Ryan has been an increasingly bitter critic of administration economic policies, painting the president and his aides as inept—or worse—and arguing aggressively that they must be removed from power in order to spur growth

Now, Ryan is changing his tune.

Instead of worrying about slow growth, Ryan is suddenly fretting that things might start going a little too well.

Complaining about the threat—at least in his head—of inflation, Ryan’s urging the Federal Reserve to stop implementing policies that are designed to decrease unemployment.

The Federal Reserve has, as part of its historic charge from Congress, a responsibility to address and fight unemployment. Too frequently over the years, the Fed has disregarded tha charge, and erred overwhelmingly on the side of Wall Street bankers and speculators rather than working Americans.

The Fed remains a troubling player.

But, to his credit, Fed chair Ben Bernanke has been more respectful than his predecessors of that charge and fiscal common sense. He has done so by working reasonably closely with the Obama administration to hold interest rates down. The hope has been that, by doing so, the Fed could encourage economic growth in a country where many regions continue to experience a recession and where some major cities suffer with unemployment rates that have edged toward Depression-era levels.

The strategy appears to be having some success.

And that seems to have upset Paul Ryan. When Bernanke appeared Thursday the Ryan’s House Budget Committee, the Republican congressman from Wisconsin announced that he feared that the Fed was loosening its standards on keeping inflation low as part of its push to bring down unemployment.

This, Ryan warned, was unacceptable.

The Budget Committee’s stance is remarkable. A House Budget Committee chair is pressuring the Federal Reserve to let interest rates rise at a time when many states are still struggling to create a sufficient number of new jobs.

At the same time, other Republicans on Ryan’s committee are attacking the Fed for trying to address the mortgage crisis.

In other words, after more than a year of obstruction by a Republican-controlled US House that has refused to act to address unemployment and underemployment, and that has rejected sound proposals for addressing the mortgage crisis, Ryan and his allies are attacking the Obama administration, Bernanke and the Fed for trying to do something.

That’s bizarre enough.

But even more bizarre is the fact that the attacks have come as fresh jobs figures confirm a pattern of improvement under policies put in place by the administration and the Fed.

Ryan’s new tack of attack may excite those Republicans who would sacrifice job growth and economic improvement for their own political gain. But it’s a stunning stance for the representative of a Congressional district that has been battered by factory closings in its major cities and some of the highest patterns of unemployment in his state. Unemployment rates for cities in Ryan’s 1st Congressional district remain among the highest in Wisconsin, as cities such as Kenosha and Janesville struggle to fill the void created by the closures of auto plants in recent years.

To be sure, Ryan is a rigid partisan. No one seriously expects him to cheer news that goes against the interests of his party and his own political ambitions.

But it is unsettling, indeed, that the representative of an industrial district that took a brutal hit with the collapse of the economic house of cards constructed by the George W. Bush administration and Congressional Republicans such as Ryan would conjure up a new attack just as things appeared to be taking a turn for the better.

The sad fact, confirmed again and again, is that Paul Ryan is more interested in playing politics than he is in improving the fortunes of working Americans—even the working Americans he is supposed to represent.

Source: wallstcheatsheet.com
Credits: Tyler Durden
Dated: 2011-10-08

How Many Jobs Does the US Economy Need to Add Per Month to Return to Pre-Crisis Levels?

Every few months we rerun an analysis of how many jobs the US economy has to generate to return to the unemployment rate as of December 2007 when the Great Financial Crisis started, by the end of Obama’s potential second term in November 2016. This calculation takes into account the historical change in Payroll and includes the 90,000/month natural growth to the labor force, and extrapolates into the future. And every time we rerun this calculation, the number of jobs that has to be created to get back to baseline increases:

First it was 245,500 in April, then 250,000 in June, then 254,000 in July. As of today, following the just announced “beat” of meager NFP expectations, this number has has just risen to an all time high 261,200. This means that unless that number of jobs is created each month for the next 5 years, America will have a higher unemployment rate in October 2016 than it did in December 2007. How realistic is it that the US economy can create 16.2 million jobs in the next 62 months? We leave that answer up to the US electorate.

Job creation demand including labor force growth Imagecredits: http://wallstcheatsheet.com