Think Progress: Limbaugh vows to leave country if health care passes.
Via the Huffington Post, Robert Kuttner notes that the direction/fate of Obama's presidency may very well be decided in March:
March 2010 will either be remembered as the month when the scales fell from Barack Obama's eyes and he realized that the bipartisan fantasy, given the current Republican Party, is a fool's errand. Or it will go down in history as the moment when Obama had a chance to change course and emerge as a leader -- and flinched. Which will it be?
From Paul Krugman's blog:
I’m with Simon Johnson here: how is it possible, at this late date, for Obama to be this clueless?
The lead story on Bloomberg right now contains excerpts from an interview with Business Week which tells us:
President Barack Obama said he doesn’t “begrudge” the $17 million bonus awarded to JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon or the $9 million issued to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. CEO Lloyd Blankfein, noting that some athletes take home more pay.
The president, speaking in an interview, said in response to a question that while $17 million is “an extraordinary amount of money” for Main Street, “there are some baseball players who are making more than that and don’t get to the World Series either, so I’m shocked by that as well.”
“I know both those guys; they are very savvy businessmen,” Obama said in the interview yesterday in the Oval Office with Bloomberg BusinessWeek, which will appear on newsstands Friday. “I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free- market system.”
Obama sought to combat perceptions that his administration is anti-business and trumpeted the influence corporate leaders have had on his economic policies. He plans to reiterate that message when he speaks to the Business Roundtable, which represents the heads of many of the biggest U.S. companies, on Feb. 24 in Washington.
Oh. My. God.
First of all, to my knowledge, irresponsible behavior by baseball players hasn’t brought the world economy to the brink of collapse and cost millions of innocent Americans their jobs and/or houses.
And more specifically, not only has the financial industry has been bailed out with taxpayer commitments; it continues to rely on a taxpayer backstop for its stability. Don’t take it from me, take it from the rating agencies:
The planned overhaul of US financial rules prompted Standard & Poor’s to warn on Tuesday it might downgrade the credit ratings of Citigroup and Bank of America on concerns that the shake-up would make it less likely that the banks would be bailed out by US taxpayers if they ran into trouble again.
The point is that these bank executives are not free agents who are earning big bucks in fair competition; they run companies that are essentially wards of the state. There’s good reason to feel outraged at the growing appearance that we’re running a system of lemon socialism, in which losses are public but gains are private. And at the very least, you would think that Obama would understand the importance of acknowledging public anger over what’s happening.
But no. If the Bloomberg story is to be believed, Obama thinks his key to electoral success is to trumpet “the influence corporate leaders have had on his economic policies.”
We’re doomed.
Incredibly, the Obama administration still holds delusions of bipartisanship. Sam Stein of the Huffington Post reports:
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said on Monday that President Obama is willing to "add various elements" to health care legislation suggested by Republican lawmakers during an upcoming bipartisan meeting on the topic…
"We have to get, frankly, the Republican members of the House and Senate to re-engage in this process," she declared. "I think it is not acceptable that half of the legislative body pushed away from the table when this conversation began months ago and basically said, 'We don't want to participate in this process.’
So, rather than showing actual leadership by pushing the Democrat-crafted bill through Congress, the Obama administration wants to "reengage" Republicans.
Earth to President Obama: Republicans do not care about healthcare reform. Their foremost concern is that you fail.
How Obama can continue to be so naïve is beyond me.
In his latest column for the Huffington Post, Robert Reich declares:
I wish conservatives would stop complaining about big government and start worrying about the real problem -- small democracy.
What exactly does Reich mean by "small democracy"? He explains:
It seems as if more and more decisions that should be made democratically are being shunted off somewhere to a few people who make them in back rooms. Which programs should be cut, which entitlements pared back, and what taxes raised in order to reduce the long-term budget deficit? Hmmm. Let's convene a commission and have them decide.
Commissions are a default mechanism when politicians want to hand off difficult issues to "experts." But reducing the long-term budget deficit has almost nothing to do with expertise. It's about our nations' values and priorities. Nothing could be more central to the democratic process. (Emphasis added)
Democracy requires at least three things: (1) Important decisions are made in the open. (2) The public and its representatives have an opportunity to debate them, so the decisions can be revised in light of what the public discovers and wants. And (3) those who make the big decisions are accountable to voters.
Reich notes that the problem extends far beyond the proposed independent deficit reduction committee. We are witnessing an alarming lack of transparency with some of the very largest government programs and initiatives.
Among the most egregious examples Reich lists:
Reich's point is not to debate whether the expanded role of Treasury and the Fed was necessary. Rather, Reich questions the bizarre cloak of secrecy under which Treasury and the Fed are permitted to spend hundreds of billions of dollars.
Reich appropriately observes:
Even if the economic emergency justified such secrecy -- and it's hard to see exactly why it would -- the emergency is over, and yet closed-door decision making continues. Will Treasury use what's left of TARP to help stimulate more jobs and, if so, how? Will the Fed stop buying mortgage-backed securities? No one knows.
Technorati Tags: Robert Reich,TARP
Barack Obama, by all accounts, is a bright individual. Yet he seems determined to ignore that timeless lesson: It's the economy, stupid.
Obama must have created quite an insular bubble at the White House if he thinks the public's foremost concern is the deficit. No, Mr. President.
I know this may sound shocking, but when the country is mired in double-digit unemployment -- with little hope for significant improvement in the near future -- the electorate is bound to be angry.
But Mr. Obama evidently has placed a higher priority on triangulation than he has on job creation.
Obama's plan to enact a three-year freeze on a large portion of discretionary spending shows he just does not get it. Robert Reich explains why this course of action is wrongheaded:
A pending freeze will make it even harder to get jobs back because government is the last spender around. Consumers have pulled back, investors won’t do much until they know consumers are out there, and exports are miniscule.
Simply put, the government should be spending more, not less. In the short term, Obama's problem is that the deficit is too small.
The country needs another FDR; however, Mr. Obama seems intent on channeling Herbert Hoover.
Update:
Not surprisingly, Mark Thoma and Brad DeLong both have harsh words for Obama's Herbert Hoover initiative.
“It is hard to imagine a less competent legislative operation,” writes Delong.
Frank Rich summarizes the current political climate:
The Obama administration is so overstocked with Goldman Sachs-Robert Rubin alumni and so tainted by its back-room health care deals with pharmaceutical and insurance companies that conservative politicians, Brown included, can masquerade shamelessly as the populist alternative.