Obama the Technocrat

President Obama proposed a budget this week that includes significant cuts to Social Security and Medicare.  Under Obama’s proposal, the government would stop linking Social Security benefits to inflation (CPI) and instead peg them to the slower growing chained CPI.  The President also wants to start means testing parts of Medicare so that wealthier Americans pay more for their healthcare.  The budget reveals what most progressives should (but often don’t) acknowledge – Obama is a technocratic centrist, deeply concerned with the deficit, who wants to cut major social programs.

Until Obama’s presidency, an ideological cornerstone of the Democratic Party had been preserving and expanding universal healthcare and pension benefits.  This proposal helps destroys that.  Don’t be fooled by the policy lingo.  “Chained-CPI” and “means testing” is bureaucratese for “cutting the shit out of and rocketing down the slippery slope.”  Chained CPI means that oldies in the future will earn less in real terms than their gray haired predecessors – they’ll actually be poorer, not better off at a slower rate.  On Medicare, Obama’s means testing makes the most efficient health insurance policy in the country vulnerable to further dissolution towards an incredibly distorted, pseudo-privatized stipend.  In summary, Obama’s plan is a substantial attack on core social programs benefitting the infirm and elderly.

The proposed budget is also completely in line with the president’s past policy positions.  President Obama has been pushing Medicare and Social Security cuts for years now.  He included $716 billion in Medicare cuts in the Affordable Care Act, has often urged Congressional Democrats to support changes to Medicare and was more than willing to increase the eligibility age for Medicare as part of his illusory “Grand Bargain.”  His willingness to cut SS benefits is also not horrendously surprising.  This is the president, after all, who threw away the public option, renewed the Bush tax cuts repeatedly at 20 cents on the political dollar and has signed off on deficit reduction proposals that have been 80/20 program cuts to tax increases.  Obama’s basically doing synchronized dolphin kicks in the deepest currents of mainstream techno-centrism, while his left-wing apparatchiks continue to claim he’s Marx Spitz riding the revolutionary wave.

Many of these true believers will try to hang their hat on the argument that the president’s budget is a strategic ploy. The New York Times reports that the administration is trying to “create cracks in the Republicans’ antitax resistance” by setting up a situation where, if Republicans obstruct, “most Americans will blame [the GOP] for the fiscal paralysis.”  The Times explains that “in a significant shift in fiscal strategy, Mr. Obama… will send a budget plan to Capitol Hill that departs from the usual presidential wishlist” by moving directly to a “final compromise offer.”  By leaking all of this, is the White House really giving away their gameplan?  What kind of poker player tells his opponents that he’s going to bluff with a shit hand and hope that they fold?  It’s much more likely that administration officials are disseminating this story, painting Obama as a savvy liberal looking to advance a progressive agenda by trading minor entitlement cuts for significant boosts in social programs and revenue, in order to mitigate the political backlash he’ll face from his attack on incredibly popular social programs.

President Obama believes in cutting Social Security and Medicare because he thinks the nation can’t afford to provide seniors and the infirm with the healthcare and pension benefits that we once did.  This budget doesn’t mark a departure from the “presidential wishlist” – this is Obama’s wishlist.

Drinking the Obama Kool-Aid, With a Twist of Hayek

The press has been hyping Obama’s recent economic proposals as part of a “21^st century liberalism” while simultaneously using a decidedly 20^th century conservative framework to explain them.  President Obama made rhetorical nods to an expanded role for government and substantial proposals around raising the minimum wage, but the New York Times channeled Hayek and Boehner in their analysis.  This ideological bias, inherent to even the most “liberal” of mainstream newspapers, does far more damage to progressive policies than it makes up for in fawning coverage of the president.

Richard Stevenson writes that Obama “made a case Tuesday night for closing out the politics of austerity.”  Stevenson almost immediately contradicts the point by saying that Obama’s anti-austerity plan involves cutting Medicare and raising taxes, representing an alleged shift away from “shrinking the government.”  Call me econ-impaired, but I believe G down, T up = austerity and shrinking government.  In fact, the goalpost has been moved so far to the right, that a president whose worldview, by Stevenson’s own admission, is defined by its “willingness to acknowledge and absorb… some of the very underpinnings of the modern conservative movement” including cuts to Medicare, is said to define 21^st century liberalism.

The NYT’s Annie Lowrey adopts a similarly conservative framework for her analysis of President Obama’s laudable plan to raise the minimum wage.  Lowrey labels the move “politically divisive” because of the “weakness of the recovery,” even though the overwhelming majority of Americans support raising the minimum wage and the increase in the total wage bill would almost certainly grow the economy despite potential declines in investment or expenditures from high income earners.  She continues by quoting an unknown UC Irvine economist who says raising the minimum wage might increase poverty (what!?) and then finishes it off by regurgitating the conservative propaganda term “job creator” (© 2009) without qualification.  The only man or woman who creates a job is the one who goes out and busts their ass every day to earn one.

The Times’ subtle but clear use of a conservative economic framework – deficits being more important than jobs, cuts to Medicare as “anti-austerity,” citations of fringe conservative scholars and the parroting of conservative language – undermines the ability of progressives to make real change for working people.  As long as right-wingers dominate the ideological terms of debate, no amount of Democrats elected to congress or soothing speeches from our 21^st century “liberal” president will be able to roll back the platinum-tinted tide of plutocracy.

Get My Taxes Cut or You’re Fired

Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz recently enlisted hundreds of DC-area Starbucks workers to fight for the Social Security/Medicare/Medicaid cutting mission of billionaire-backed Fix the Debt.  Fix the Debt is a lobbying group composed of over 100 CEOs and executives from corporate giants like GE, Honeywell, and Goldman Sachs that aims to lower corporate taxes and protect defense spending, while cutting Social Security benefit growth, slashing Medicare funding and reducing expenditures on Medicaid for the poor.  Starbucks “partners” (which along with “member,” “associate,” “teammate” and “crew member” is just another bullshit Orwellian term intended to make you feel way more empowered at work than you actually are) were encouraged to write the phrase “Come Together [to cut my benefits and lower my boss’ taxes]” on patrons’ cups to send a “respectful and optimistic message to our elected officials” to lower the debt.

Schultz’ effort, which commenced the day after Christmas, follows a growing number of CEO attempts to influence the political positions of employees and harness worker manpower to push pro-rich, pro-business agendas.  No longer content to simply buy politicians, CEOs are now intent on directly coercing voters by threatening their livelihoods.

• In the run-up to the Presidential election, Westgate Resorts CEO David Siegel told his employees that if President Obama was reelected and implemented new taxes, “I will have no choice but to reduce the size of this company” which “means fewer jobs, less benefits and certainly less opportunity for everyone.”
• ASG Software Solutions CEO Arthur Allen warned that if President Obama was reelected, ASG would “lose our independence as a company” resulting in the potential elimination of “about 60 percent of the salaries of the employees of [the] company.”
• Murray Energy CEO Robert Murray allegedly conditioned promotions and bonuses on political donations, and pushed workers to attend Romney campaign events without pay.

Similar examples can be found with the Koch brothers and a number of other executives.

This continuation and strengthening of corporate influence on the body politic is clearly disturbing.  In most states, your boss has the right to fire or discipline you based on how you vote, who you donate money to or which political policies you advocate.  While CEOs used to use this power sparingly for fear of facing public ire, the gloves are increasingly coming off.  It doesn’t take a stretch of the imagination to envision a near-future world where political beliefs are screened in interviews, employee contributions are tracked by HR and dissenters are slow-tracked or fired.  Employment contracts already restrict workers’ dress, speech, movement, rights to association and many other behaviors, so why not political beliefs?

The other important part of this story is to highlight methods of resistance.  In California, state law restricts employers from terminating or threatening to fire employees based on their political beliefs.  Oregon has laws banning captive political meetings by employers and threats/actualization of dismissal based on voting.  Union contracts, which typically require “just cause” for discipline or termination, are also an effective way to stop corporate meddling.  Then there’s always the possibility that progressives will put down their Quinoa-infused organic enemas and double skinny vanilla lattes for a half-second and actually start to boycott anti-worker companies like Whole Foods and Starbucks.  Unless the left begins to strongly push for freedom of speech at work, collective bargaining for workers and public fight-backs against these modern barons, we’re all in for a darkly corporate-dominated political future.

Britain Triple Dippin’

The United Kingdom, amidst increasing austerity measures taken by the government, is heading toward a triple-dip recession following a 0.3% decline in GDP for 4Q 2012.  IHS Global Insight economist Howard Archer predicts UK GDP will not return to its 1Q 2008 level until the first half of 2015, representing seven lost years.  Even the IMF’s Chief Economist Olivier Blanchard is concerned, recently telling the British Chancellor that Britain should “reassess” its austerity policies – which is a little like John Blutarsky telling you to take it down a notch on the booze.

Source: The Telegraph (UK)

All of this points to the glaringly obvious Keynesian point that you don’t cut government spending and raise taxes in a recession!  Not only will fiscal contraction cut economic growth, it also inevitably fails to reduce public debt because lower GDP growth decreases incomes and tax revenues, which makes it harder to close budget deficits in the first place.  Britain’s National Institute for Economic and Social Research has predicted that “Britain’s debt to gross domestic product (GDP) ratio will be 4.85 percentage points higher by 2013 because of the spending cuts and tax rises introduced by the Coalition government.”

Although US growth has been sluggish by understandably high American standards (we are the richest/greatest country on the planet after all), the US has done far better than most of its European counterparts.

Source: Paul Krugman

Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman points out that Europe’s austerity policies are largely to blame for this stagnating growth, and has loudly called for the US to implement additional stimulus to boost the economy.  It’s depressingly clear that Washington is not listening.

The Grassroots Are Growing Right

GOP lawmakers in state capitals around the nation are in the process of instituting radical right-wing economic programs after a series of electoral victories over the past few years. Kansas has privatized Medicaid services, instituted wide-ranging cuts to social programs for the poor and is set to dramatically cut income taxes with the goal of abolishing them altogether. Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal has proposed replacing his states corporate and income taxes with a sales tax while cutting health services for the poor. And many governments in the nation’s 24 states where Republicans control both the legislative and executive branches are putting forth similar proposals. This is on top of the recent passage of right-to-work (for less pay) laws in Indiana and Michigan, and collective bargaining restrictions in Wisconsin.

The boldness and successful implementation of these hard-right policies highlights the relative strength of conservative ideology and the tea-party led conservative grassroots movement. Conservative political thinkers have been banging the same anti-tax, pro-privatization, anti-public services drum for forty years now, and their message is clear. Does it make sense that giving rich people more money to squirrel away in their Scrooge McDuck gold vaults and depriving bright poor youngsters of health and education funds will encourage economic growth? No! Does it make sense that cutting hundreds of thousands of public jobs in the middle of the worst recession in 70 years will create more jobs? No! Does it make any sense that allowing workers to free-ride off union contracts w/o paying dues, thereby undermining worker power and eventually the very viability of the collective bargaining unit itself, will somehow improve workers’ lives? Fuck no! But that doesn’t stop conservative ideologues from saying that all of this (and much more!) makes perfect sense, and they’ve said it consistently and stridently enough for decades now that they’ve built up credibility. Progressive thought, with the exception of a handful of social issues like abortion rights, is completely devoid of a similar common base of beliefs, held over a long period of time, that people can rally behind.

Additionally, the right has a tea-party movement that actually believes in all the crazy shit these conservative ideologues say and has worked hard to propagate and fight for these beliefs. Mainstream media pundits love to deride the tea-party candidates and caucus, but all you have to do is recognize how dominant talk of the debt/fiscal crisis has been in Washington to realize that they’ve been largely successful. The right-wing House has not folded time and again like the progressive caucus, and they’ve pushed the center of debate further and further to the right (with Dems now talking about Social Security and Medicare cuts). At the state level, Republican-dominated legislatures are actually implementing deeply conservative policies after being put into office by voters.

In times of crisis, people look for answers. Until progressives are willing to put forward large, visionary proposals, and actually stick by them, right-wing forces will continue to steamroll workers and the middle-class across large swaths of America.