The one percent Attack Elizabeth Warren for Her Support of Occupy Wall Street and the 99 percent

Massachusetts Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren isn’t letting an attack ad by a Karl Rove group dampen her support for Occupy Wall Street.

“At Occupy Wall Street, protesters attack police, do drugs and trash public parks,” the Crossroads GPS ad claims. “They support radical redistribution of wealth and violence, but Warren boasts, ‘I created much of the intellectual foundation for what they do. … I support what they do.’”

“It fair to say that I’ve been protesting Wall Street for years and years,” Warren replied. “I’m am glad to see lots of people start to really push on this issue.”

“Let’s face it. Something’s badly broken in America right now. We’ve got a middle class that has been hammered financially for a generation, and we’ve got a Washington that works only for those that can hire an army of lobbyists and an army of lawyers. And that means it’s not working for the rest of us. So yeah, I protest that. I’ve been worried about that. I’ve been working on that for a very long time.”

“So, [the protesters'] mission, their tactics, their philosophy, you all agree with?” Wu pressed.

“No, let’s be clear: Everybody has to follow the law,” Warren explained. “There’s no exception on that. And more to the point, though, this is an independent, organic movement. It’s its own voice. It has its own pieces. It will go in its own direction. We don’t speak with a unitary voice anywhere about what needs to be changed. There are lots of people, lots of voices. Whether they’ve taken to the streets, whether they are sitting at home just saying, ‘This doesn’t work anymore.’”

She added: “We need a lot of voices saying, ‘We got to have change.’ Because it’s clear Washington’s not looking to change on their own and Wall Street is going to keep pumping money into Washington, pumping it into elections, to make sure their way is the dominant way in this country. I think that’s wrong.”

Click on link below.

http://rawreplaymedia.com/fvp/fvp5.8/player.swf

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The Four Obstacles to Upward Mobility for Young People Today. Click on the link here — http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/2011/1108/Top-4-economic-obstacles-for-young-people-and-ways-to-cope/Mounting-college-debt

There are four formidable obstacles for young people today. I would add a few others to the article at the link below. But theirs are more personal obstacles. The political climate today is creating all the problems listed in the article. There is a war against the middle class being waged by Fox News, the Koch Brothers, Rupert Murdoch, Wall Street, the United States Chamber of Commerce and lots of other rich folks. They want to lower the standard of living for the middle class. They’ve been doing this successfully for thirty years. They control 100% of the Republican Party, 80% percent of the Democratic Party and the corrupt Corporate Wing of the Supreme Court.

With that in mind, click the link below.

Four economic things standing in the way of young people

Click the link below and see a related story.

This is a related story.

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Higher Education is Costing More and More Because Wall Street and the Rich are Stealing the American Dream With the Buying of Congressional and Presidential Votes

State spending for public colleges and universities dropped sharply last year, as the state-by-state numbers contained in this special report from the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education demonstrate. At the same time, tuition and required fee charges rose significantly in many states, and some states reduced their student financial aid programs.

There’s a reason for that. Much of the tax base that has supported higher education has been shipped overseas. Wall Street, the Koch Brothers, and large corporations have ordered its Legislative Toy Boys in Congress to pass free trade agreements. When jobs and tax revenues are shipped overseas, the difference between the old US compensation and the new, lower compensation, is given to the rich via higher dividends and rising share prices. It also destroys the tax base.

Much of that money is funneled back to politicians via campaign contributions and more sinister perks, like golfing vacations in Scotland and high paying jobs once they leave office. In the meantime, the middle class is forced to pay higher tuition and fees because of this transfer of income scheme.

Higher tuition means more student debt. More student debt is then bundled by banks and sold to Wall Street investment banks, such as Goldman Sacs. Investment banks then issue bonds which are generally sold to the super rich who collect interest on the bonds, which are paid when students make their payments, or the government does. Remember, the government guarantees these loans, which means the government guarantees the bonds. In other words, higher tuition helps rich people become richer. This is just another income redistribution scam.

The result of less state spending was the worst fiscal news for public higher education institutions and their students in at least a decade, as the economic recession struck almost every state. So far this year, the picture looks even bleaker, with states continuing to cut higher education appropriations and campuses responding by raising tuition even higher, imposing new fees and reducing student financial assistance.

The report’s numbers come from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis; the U.S. Bureau of the Census; the National Association of State Budget Officers; the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems; the Washington (state) Higher Education Coordinating Board; and the annual “Grapevine” report published by the Center for the Study of Education Policy, at Illinois State University.

They show that state support for higher education, measured in current dollars, increased only 1.2 percent, a sharp decline from last year’s 3.5 percent and the smallest increase in a decade. Appropriations dropped in 14 states, with the largest decline-11 percent-in Oregon.

Tuition and mandatory fee charges at four-year public institutions rose in every state, startlingly so in some cases. In Massachusetts, for instance, tuition jumped from $3,295 to $4,075, an increase of 24 percent, largest in the nation. Iowa, Missouri and Texas increased tuition and required fees by 20 percent, North Carolina by 19 percent, Ohio by 17 percent. Sixteen states increased tuition and fees by more than 10 percent.

Tuition increased by just two percent in New York State last year, but Governor George Pataki, after cutting the State University of New York’s 2003-2004 budget by $184 million, proposed a 35 percent increase in SUNY undergraduate tuition. The governor trimmed the City University of New York budget by $83 million, but left it up to the system’s governing board to determine tuition charges.

Community college tuition and mandatory fees rose in all but two states (California and Maine), with 10 states registering increases of more than 10 percent. The biggest increases were in Massachusetts and South Carolina, where charges jumped 26 percent.

Fourteen states increased their total investment in student grant aid by more than 10 percent between 2001 and 2002, the report notes. South Carolina had the largest percentage increase-94 percent.

But 17 states spent less on student financial aid in 2002 than they had the year before. Massachusetts had the largest decrease (24 percent), followed by Rhode Island (20 percent), Nebraska (15 percent), Utah (14 percent), and Connecticut (13 percent).

If 2002 was a bad year financially for public colleges and universities, 2003 will be worse, most experts predict. The economic forces that accounted for last year’s problems are still active-recession in almost every state, the uncertainties surrounding a possible war, the need to provide adequate funding for K-12 education and Medicaid before fretting about higher education.

“Most states are still experiencing very serious problems,” said Scott Pattison, executive director of the National Association of State Budget Officers.

There are a few exceptions, he said: Wyoming-where taxes on revenue from mineral extraction have helped to balance the state budget-and a few other small-population states. But even Texas, which had been able to balance its budget because of generous tax revenues from oil and gas, faces a two-year budget deficit conservatively estimated to be around $10 billion.

“The disease has struck here, too,” said Don Brown, Texas higher education commissioner.

According to Pattison, at least 16 states are considering, or already have implemented, mid-year budget cuts and/or tuition increases.

An informal survey by the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges, representing 215 public institutions, found mid-year tuition hikes ranging from 4.6 percent at the University of Connecticut to 13 percent at Virginia Tech.

Ohio Governor Bob Taft has responded to that state’s average 18 percent tuition increases this year by proposing a six percent cap on future hikes at all public colleges and universities except Ohio State, where he would allow a nine percent increase.

After several years of freezing tuition rates, Virginia now has seen increases for the fall and spring semesters that average 15.6 percent on its public campuses. The higher tuitions are a response to more than $500 million in higher education budget cuts made by Governor Mark Warner as he has attempted to cope with a budget deficit of about $6 billion.

In the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education survey, Massachusetts has some of the poorest ratings-largest tuition increase in four-year public institutions (24 percent), second largest in community colleges (26 percent), biggest cut in student financial aid (24 percent), and a three percent reduction in state appropriation for public higher education.

These numbers translate into steep cutbacks on the state’s campuses. At the University of Massachusetts’ flagship campus in Amherst, the size of the freshman class has been reduced by 1,000, 400 staffers, including 100 professors, have taken early retirement, and there is no money for faculty or staff pay raises. In addition, classes are crowded, the library was unable to buy any new books last year, and seven sports teams have been eliminated.

In California, where Governor Gray Davis is proposing deep cuts to help close an 18-month budget gap of between $30 and $35 billion, the University of California already has increased tuition by $135 for the spring semester and might triple that sum for the 2003-2004 academic year.

At the 23-campus, 400,000-student California State University, trustees voted to increase “fees” (which would be called tuition anywhere but California) by $76 a semester beginning in January. Davis cut the Cal State operating budget by $326 million but is proposing a $150 million increase to cover enrollment growth next year.

Cal State Chancellor Charles B. Reed said, “I don’t think the nation has faced this before-heavy budget cuts combined with enrollment growth. It’s a real double whammy.” But Reed said Cal State plans to use the growth money to accommodate an additional 20,000 students next year, while depending on the increased fee revenue to maintain access. At the same time, Cal State will try to make sure that faculty members are available to teach courses students need in order to graduate.

In effect, Cal State will be swallowing a $200 million budget cut while still increasing enrollment by 20,000, but Reed warned that the plan will succeed only if the money Davis has allocated for enrollment growth survives a long and probably contentious budget process. “If we can manage this well, good things are going to happen for us,” he said. “But if we don’t get the growth money, next year is going to be a nightmare.”

Even if Reed’s scenario plays out, Cal State classes will be larger, some faculty will be asked to teach more, some programs are likely to be dropped, and little progress will be made toward the goal of increasing the percentage of full-time faculty in the system.

The Davis budget is especially tough on California’s 108 community colleges, cutting their state appropriation by $530 million, or 10.5 percent, while asking that tuition be increased from $11 per credit hour (lowest in the nation) to $24.

“This is the most devastating reduction to community college financing that I’ve seen,” said Kevin Ramirez, president of Sierra Community College and vice president of the Community College League of California.

Some community college officials estimate that the budget cuts and fee increases will cause an enrollment decline of about 200,000 students. The budget proposal acknowledges that the fee increase is likely to trim community college enrollment by at least 40,000 and gives that as a reason for reducing the state appropriation.

“By the same logic, if we executed more prison inmates, we could reduce state spending on prisons,” one critic observed.

Said another, “Governor Davis and his top staff people either went to the University of California or elite private universities. People with that mentality don’t understand the gateway role of the community colleges.”

Community college lobbyists hope to persuade legislators not to go along with Davis’ proposed cuts. “We’re having a lot of success,” said Scott Lay of the Community College League, “but in the end it’s the governor who has the blue pencil.”

Reformers fear that many of the gains of recent years will be lost in the budget-cutting. In Kentucky, for example, where Governor Paul Patton has led a campaign to increase the state’s research capacity, its literacy rate and its participation in education beyond high school, things seem to be unraveling.

Higher education institutions have been warned to prepare for a 9.1 percent budget cut. There is no money for the trust funds that enabled the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education to promote promising campus reforms. Nor is there money for the “Bucks for Brains” program, which has spent $220 million in the last two years to lure top researchers to the University of Kentucky and the University of Louisville.

“This budget is just going to wreak havoc with the momentum behind reform,” said Bill Swinford, the council’s legislative representative.

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It’s Time to Occupy the Democratic Party

By Phil Rosenberg

The Occupy Wall Street movement is less than two months old, and its future trajectory is impossible to predict. But with the expansive strategy of last week’s general strike in Oakland, which brought tens of thousands of people into the streets, it’s beginning to look increasingly possible that it could be the emergence of a long-time force in US politics

The initial numbers are quite promising. While Congress’ approval rating has registered as low as nine per cent in recent polls, Occupy Wall Street enjoyed landslide majority support of 67 per cent of New York City residents in a mid-October poll. Just before that, a Time Poll found that 54 per cent of Americans had a favourable view of OWS, vs 23 per cent unfavourable. Even more telling, Time went on to ask about “some of the issues the protestors have raised”, and elicited even higher levels of agreement with the following statement: “Wall Street and its lobbyists have too much influence in Washington”: 86/11 per cent agree/disagree. “The gap between rich and poor in the United States has grown too large”: 79/7. “Executives of financial institutions responsible for the financial meltdown in 2008 should be prosecuted”: 71/23. “The rich should pay more taxes”: 68/28.

Meanwhile, also echoing the Occupy Wall Street message, a nearly simultaneous Washington Post/Bloomberg News Poll found the public overwhelmingly opposed to the Washington bipartisan consensus on slashing the welfare state. Respondents opposed “Reducing Medicare benefits” by 82/14 (77/18 among Republicans) and opposed “Reducing Social Security benefits” by 83/13 (79/16 among Republicans). Other polls have yielded similar results. When Occupy Wall Street says “we are the 99 per cent”, the polling says they are right.

Yet, it’s a long way from being a fledgling movement in sync with the public to building long-term influence and staying power. In the short run, the Occupy movement faces significant obstacles, not the least of which is big city Democratic mayors whose decisions have resulted in mass arrests, all too often involving police violence. Oakland is the obvious high-profile example, with an out-of-control police department that’s been under federal court supervision since 2003, with little to show for it. The 2003 consent decree was not demonstration-specific, but covered a widespread pattern of police misconduct in the use of force.

The hearing

At a hearing just one month before the projectile shooting of Marine Corporal Scott Olsen – which in turn lead to the one-day general strike – Judge Thelton Henderson lambasted Oakland’s continued lack of compliance, saying, “I’m not interested in listening to promises about how things are going to be” and “the city and the department still don’t get it”. The hearing was attended by Oakland Mayor Jean Quan and other top city officials – none of whom appear to have been listening.

But Oakland is hardly alone when it comes to Democratic mayors ordering mass arrests of Occupiers for exercising their First Amendment rights. In fact, aside from New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg – a Republican turned independent – most of the mayors involved have been Democrats. Boston’s Mayor Tom Menino had 141 people arrested on October 11. Under Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel, roughly 300 Occupy supporters have been arrested in a series of attempts to set up a stable base camp. In Atlanta, 52 protesters were arrested on October 26 under orders of Mayor Kasim Reed, who said the “last straw” came when a man carrying an AK-47 joined the demonstrators. But the man was rejected by the Occupiers, and what he did was legal under Georgia law. Besides, no Tea Party demonstration was ever shut down because someone there was carrying an assault weapon.

The weekend after Olsen was shot in Oakland, 27 Occupiers were arrested in Portland under Mayor Sam Adams, and 25 were arrested in Denver, under Mayor Michael Hancock. The Denver arrests were particularly violent as police in riot gear attacked peaceful demonstrators with tear gas and pepper spray pellets. Dozens more have been arrested in Des Moines, St Louis, Cincinnati, Seattle, Sacramento, and San Francisco – all with Democratic mayors.

While some mass arrests have been deliberately planned, and very professionally handled by police, the predominant pattern has been much more troubling: Despite a grudging admission that people have a right to protest, Democratic mayors have generally viewed Occupy demonstrators in a negative light, and have not shown much interest or inclination in any sort of productive relationship. The city of Los Angeles was a noted exception initially, with city council members even visiting them, and passing a supportive resolution, but more recently both the mayor and an initially enthusiastic councilmember have begun to talk about shutting them down.

The Democratic mayors’ hostility or indifference is so widespread as to seem somehow natural, and in one sense it is: it’s a business-as-usual response. But for mayors in the US today, business is anything but usual. All the budget cuts at the higher levels trickle down on them, along with their own direct revenue losses from crashing property and sales tax revenues. As the National League of Cities reported in its 26th annual report: “General city revenues are continuing to fall, with a projected -2.3 per cent decrease by the end of 2011. This is the fifth straight year of declines in revenue with probable further declines in 2012. Property tax collections are expected to decline by -3.7 per cent with further declines likely in 2012 and 2013.”

Long-term obsessions

With national politics still obsessed with long-term deficit cutting, things are only going to get worse for cities and their mayors, so long as politics continues to be dominated by the budget-cutting priorities of the one per cent. The Occupy movement is a catalyst for opposition to this agenda, and thus seemingly a natural ally for all mayors – but particularly Democratic ones, whose core constituencies suffer disproportionately compared to the GOP donor base. Yet, the record so far suggests that Democratic mayors are as out of touch with popular sentiment as their Beltway counterparts, and equally lacking in innovative thinking.

There are reasons for this, author David Sirota explained recently in Salon, citing a number of different issues and examples to argue that “urban areas are a driving force behind the widening intra-party rift between the corporatist, pro-privatisation Wall Street Democrats and the traditional labor-progressive ‘Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party’.” More on this shortly.

But first, consider this: Not only is the Occupy movement popular, cooperation with it could make a good deal of sense. There are a number of ideas that local officials could implement to help their local economies that Occupy movement supporters would surely be pleased with. A prime example is the creation of local municipal banks, which could significantly amplify the benefits of moving people’s money out of the major mega-banks. Along with local small banks and credit unions, they can help provide the small business lending to help revive our economy that Wall Street banks have shown no interest in.

How mainstream is this idea at the local level? Consider this: In a recent candidate forum for an LA city council special election I am covering, one candidate was asked about the idea of depositing state, local and federal funds in local, state-chartered banks. The candidate readily agreed with that idea, but quickly expanded the horizon, saying: “I think the city of Los Angeles should consider creating its own bank to accelerate development opportunities.” The candidate was a moderate Republican, and longtime aide to the former Democratic councilmember, who has just been elected to Congress. He was just endorsed by the LA Times. If he could voluntarily advance this idea on his own, Democratic mayors could surely find some way to support it. And if this idea could bring those mayors closer together with Occupiers, and begin a dialogue, in place of costly confrontations, why not choose the path of cooperation?

Perhaps because they’re already cooperating with someone else, as described by Sirota. Historically, Chicago has been a bastion of “labour power and liberal economics,” Sirota notes. But that’s no longer true:

“In recent years, the Windy City has become ‘the most aggressive city in the United States in the privatization of public infrastructure,’ according to the Public Interest Research Group. Citing the city’s budget crisis, officials have sold off highways and parking meters at cut-rate prices – all to pad the profits of corporate investors (the schemes are now being explored by other Democratic cities including Pittsburgh and Los Angeles). Despite this, during its once-in-a-generation contested mayoral election in 2010, the city’s voters chose investment banker Rahm Emanuel over other far more economically progressive candidates, and Emanuel quickly filled his administration with corporate consultants eager to accelerate the privatization already under way. Now, Emanuel has declared war on organised labour, with the Associated Press’s headline blaring “Even in Chicago, Mayor Goes After Labor Unions.”

‘Corporate-friendly education’

Chicago is also where Obama’s basketball partner/Secretary of Education Arne Duncan built a reputation with his corporate-friendly anti-teacher education reform “miracle” – which, typically, turned out to be illusory after his appointment was confirmed. But it’s still the guiding inspiration for Obama’s teacher-hostile education policy, which, like his foreign policy, is much more a fine-tuning of Bush’s previous policy than it is a change in direction or philosophy. More importantly to the point at hand, corporate-friendly education policy has numerous friends in Democratic-run cities, as Sirota goes on to point out:

“On education, the Democratic-voting city of Washington, DC, was the place that launched the political career of Michelle Rhee, the face of the right-wing effort to siphon public school money into private schools; Democratic Los Angeles has seen a successful Wal-Mart-funded effort to encroach on traditional public education, with more privately administered ‘public’ schools than any district in the country; and Democratic New Orleans has seen a wholesale charter-isation of its schools.”

These policies represent a clear dividing line with the Occupy movement, which has plenty of teachers in its midst. In Los Angeles, one of the first actions organised by Occupy LA was a collaboration with public school teachers dubbed Occupy LAUSD [LA Unified School District]. Roughly 200 people marched on the LAUSD school board more than a mile away from Occupy LA’s base camp.

“Occupy LAUSD participants took on the district, education philanthropists and charter schools as well as giving voice to familiar themes such as opposing corporate greed and inequality,” the LA Times reported.

LAUSD Superintendent John Deasy was outraged, arrogant and confused. “Occupy LAUSD is both misinformed and contrary to the spirit and intent of Occupy Wall Street, Occupy LA, and the other laudable movements for economic justice that have sprung up around the country and the world over the last month,” he said. The fact that Occupy LAUSD was a co-creation of Occupy LA somehow escaped his grasp. He knew their own minds better than they did, apparently.

But a reporter for LAist understood the logic quite well: “Why conflate the one per cent of the country with a battered school district? Perhaps having billionaire corporations and types like Eli Broad, Bill Gates, Philip Anschultz, and NewsCorp, and Goldman Sachs directly fund the mayor’s Coalition for School Reform translates into policies that benefit that same one per cent? Could it be?”

The fact that Deasy doesn’t even understand which side he is on shows just how much public education work there is to be done. It’s not all up to the Occupy movement. To the contrary, the Occupy movement should be understood as a call to engage – a call to each of us. But it’s also a call to Democratic Party activists.

Whatever people in the Beltway may think, the Occupy movement is not going to be a tool of the Democratic Party. It only exists because the Democratic Party failed to deliver on its promise after its historic victory in 2008. Or, more precisely, it did deliver, but what it delivered was nothing like what it seemed to promise in the way of hope and change.

But this doesn’t mean that progressive Democrats can’t walk and chew gum at the same time. They can support and participate in the Occupy movement, and they can leverage its appeal to fight back against the corporate dominance of their own party – to occupy it for the 99 per cent. Pushing Democratic mayors to stop harassing Occupiers and engage in dialogue instead would be one way to do this. Pushing for the establishment of municipal banks would be another. And of course, pushing Democratic mayors and other local elected officials to oppose corporate education “reform” would be a third. No doubt there are many other ways as well. Progressive Democrats have their work cut out for them.

So do we all.

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Will Labor Be Able to Defeat the Wall Street/Koch Brothers Alliance in the General Election Next Year After Their Knockout Win in Ohio?

Labor unions can only hope next year’s main event goes as well as Tuesday’s dress rehearsal in Ohio.

The landslide defeat via referendum of a state law spearheaded by Republican Gov. John Kasich that curbed collective-bargaining rights of public employees instills hope in unions and their Democratic allies that they have found a template to defeat the GOP in 2012. Labor leaders say they will apply the lessons learned in the Buckeye State, a key political battleground, to a bevy of swing states that could determine the balance of power in Washington.

“Our work is just beginning this morning,” Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, told reporters on Wednesday. “Already, we’re moving into the next phase, where working people are mobilizing in Ohio and nationwide.”

Labor’s takeaways from last night’s larger-than-expected 22-point victory: Voters were disappointed Kasich and his Republican allies committed ideological overreach instead of focusing on job creation. They also liked and trusted the men and women targeted by the reforms—public employees like teachers and police officers—more than the politicians who did the targeting.

In an exit poll of Ohio voters conducted by Democratic pollster Guy Molyneux, only 25 percent of the state’s electorate said the collective-bargaining law “was the change Ohio was voting for.”

“This was very much a sense of overreach and it was inconsistent of what voters had been asking for,” Molyneux said.

Democrats can make Republican overreach a theme of next year’s election, labor officials said, with Democrats pointing not just to Ohio’s example but to governors in battleground states like Wisconsin and Florida. They also can highlight the Republican agenda in the U.S. House.

“What happened in Ohio in last night matters everywhere,” Trumka said.

Molyneux’s firm surveyed 1,015 early and Election Day voters by telephone for the AFL-CIO. One finding in particular might have the most far-reaching consequence for next year: The poll reported that 61 percent of white non-college voters opposed the new law.

That demographic has confounded Democrats of late, and has always been a weak spot for President Obama. Last year, 63 percent of non-college whites supported Republican House candidates, according to exit polls. In Ohio, 54 percent of them backed Kasich as he narrowly unseated the incumbent, Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland.

That means that in exactly one year, blue-collar whites had a 36-point swing against an initiative backed by a governor they helped to put in office. If Democrats and Obama can come close to replicating that shift next year, they would easily triumph in a state that is a key to every presidential election. No Republican has ever won the White House without winning Ohio.

Labor unions are vowing to harness Tuesday’s momentum. Earlier this year, Trumka announced plans to build a robust political organization to operate in an array of important states, and Ohio was the first test case of his new agenda. The organization built this year will stay in place through 2012 and beyond, a significant difference from years past.

“A year ago, just like three and five years ago, everyone was packing up and going home,” said one labor official.

Even as Democrats gloated about the victory, Republicans—publicly at least—claimed to be unperturbed. The Ohio race was a more important fight for liberals than conservatives, GOP strategists said, and the amount of resources that unions invested into the battle was far greater than what they can manage in a national election.

“There was no single touchstone to motivate Republicans to raise money, spend money, and win,” said Rick Wilson, a Republican strategist. “I think you’re going to see in the general election picture the opportunity to defeat Barack Obama is important.”

Wilson added that white non-college voters might have swung against the collective-bargaining bill, but that doesn’t mean they’ll support Obama.

“That demographic hates Obama with a burning passion,” he said.

Republicans also point to the success the party had in Wisconsin, where Democrats tried to make an election issue of another contentious bill to limit public employees’ collective bargaining rights, but the GOP turned back a recall effort to reclaim the state Senate and won a symbolic state Supreme Court race. Next year’s presidential battle will hinge on Obama’s handling of the economy and other national initiatives he’s pushed, like the health care law, said Greg Mueller, a GOP strategist.

“I think election is going to be more about ‘Obamacare’ and size and role of government … than the issue of collective bargaining,” he said.

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Nobel Prize Winning Economist Paul Krugman Explains the Crisis of the Euro

I agree with Paul Krugman and his take on the Euro crisis, but there is one thing Mr. Krugman doesn’t mention. At least two of the nations, Spain and Italy, shipped away much of their manufacturing base long ago in order to redistribute income and wealth from working people to the politically powerful affluent class. The same thing happened in the UK. Sweden and Germany didn’t do the same thing nearly so much, so these nations remain economically vibrant because the working classes there have good paying jobs. –John Hively

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: November 10, 2011 in the New York Times

This is the way the euro ends — not with a bang but with bunga bunga. Not long ago, European leaders were insisting that Greece could and should stay on the euro while paying its debts in full. Now, with Italy falling off a cliff, it’s hard to see how the euro can survive at all.
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

But what’s the meaning of the eurodebacle? As always happens when disaster strikes, there’s a rush by ideologues to claim that the disaster vindicates their views. So it’s time to start debunking.

First things first: The attempt to create a common European currency was one of those ideas that cut across the usual ideological lines. It was cheered on by American right-wingers, who saw it as the next best thing to a revived gold standard, and by Britain’s left, which saw it as a big step toward a social-democratic Europe. But it was opposed by British conservatives, who also saw it as a step toward a social-democratic Europe. And it was questioned by American liberals, who worried — rightly, I’d say (but then I would, wouldn’t I?) — about what would happen if countries couldn’t use monetary and fiscal policy to fight recessions.

So now that the euro project is on the rocks, what lessons should we draw?

I’ve been hearing two claims, both false: that Europe’s woes reflect the failure of welfare states in general, and that Europe’s crisis makes the case for immediate fiscal austerity in the United States.

The assertion that Europe’s crisis proves that the welfare state doesn’t work comes from many Republicans. For example, Mitt Romney has accused President Obama of taking his inspiration from European “socialist democrats” and asserted that “Europe isn’t working in Europe.” The idea, presumably, is that the crisis countries are in trouble because they’re groaning under the burden of high government spending. But the facts say otherwise.

It’s true that all European countries have more generous social benefits — including universal health care — and higher government spending than America does. But the nations now in crisis don’t have bigger welfare states than the nations doing well — if anything, the correlation runs the other way. Sweden, with its famously high benefits, is a star performer, one of the few countries whose G.D.P. is now higher than it was before the crisis. Meanwhile, before the crisis, “social expenditure” — spending on welfare-state programs — was lower, as a percentage of national income, in all of the nations now in trouble than in Germany, let alone Sweden.

Oh, and Canada, which has universal health care and much more generous aid to the poor than the United States, has weathered the crisis better than we have.

The euro crisis, then, says nothing about the sustainability of the welfare state. But does it make the case for belt-tightening in a depressed economy?

You hear that claim all the time. America, we’re told, had better slash spending right away or we’ll end up like Greece or Italy. Again, however, the facts tell a different story.

First, if you look around the world you see that the big determining factor for interest rates isn’t the level of government debt but whether a government borrows in its own currency. Japan is much more deeply in debt than Italy, but the interest rate on long-term Japanese bonds is only about 1 percent to Italy’s 7 percent. Britain’s fiscal prospects look worse than Spain’s, but Britain can borrow at just a bit over 2 percent, while Spain is paying almost 6 percent.

What has happened, it turns out, is that by going on the euro, Spain and Italy in effect reduced themselves to the status of third-world countries that have to borrow in someone else’s currency, with all the loss of flexibility that implies. In particular, since euro-area countries can’t print money even in an emergency, they’re subject to funding disruptions in a way that nations that kept their own currencies aren’t — and the result is what you see right now. America, which borrows in dollars, doesn’t have that problem.

The other thing you need to know is that in the face of the current crisis, austerity has been a failure everywhere it has been tried: no country with significant debts has managed to slash its way back into the good graces of the financial markets. For example, Ireland is the good boy of Europe, having responded to its debt problems with savage austerity that has driven its unemployment rate to 14 percent. Yet the interest rate on Irish bonds is still above 8 percent — worse than Italy.

The moral of the story, then, is to beware of ideologues who are trying to hijack the European crisis on behalf of their agendas. If we listen to those ideologues, all we’ll end up doing is making our own problems — which are different from Europe’s, but arguably just as severe — even worse.

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Colin Powell Supports Occupy Wall Street

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell said Thursday that he sympathized with the “frustration and angriness” exhibited by “Occupy Wall Street” protesters.

“I was born in Harlem to immigrant parents, and my parents always had a job,” Powell told CNN’s Piers Morgan. “And so, people are concerned now that there is not that source of an income. There isn’t that work source that I remember.”

“So, what you’re seeing with ‘Occupy Wall Street’ and the others are people who are unhappy, and they’re directing their unhappiness right now towards Wall Street and towards those they think are doing to well in our society,” he continued. “And so, demonstrating like this is as American as apple pie. We have been marching up and down and demonstrating throughout our history. … And so, I get a little concerned when demonstrations turn into violence, or when some of the demonstrators demonstrate absolute nihilism and they’re really not interested in anything but destruction and tearing down the system.”

“Do you understand the anger particularly towards Wall Street, I think?” Morgan asked. “What really gets their goat is that a lot of these banks and bankers got bailed out by the taxpayers. The first chance they got, when they got back on their feet, to not give themselves huge bonuses again, they ignored that temptation and put their noses back in the trough.”

“Well, you know, I don’t know how to be too critical of that,” Powell replied. “And one of the things that is of concern to all of us is that there’s an increasing gap between those who are doing very well and I’m doing well, and those who are not doing as well. And those who are not doing as well are not seeing their lives improving. And so, there’s frustration and angriness there.”

“And so, it isn’t enough to scream at the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ demonstrators. We need our political system to start reflecting this anger back in to how do we fix it? How do we get the economy going again? How do we get businesses that have a lot of money stacked up, how do we get them to invest that money and create jobs?”

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Occupy Portland Gets Notice of Eviction Under Pressure

Portland Mayor Samuel Adams has announced a deadline of 12:01 am Sunday to leave their encampment or be forcibly evicted. The mayor seems to have been sympathetic to the Occupy Portland, but he is under pressure from powerful members and supporters of the one percent.

The most publicly vocal of these seems to be the Oregonian newspaper. Based on what the editors have written about ending Occupy Portland, as well as their support for the outsourcing of jobs and reducing the wages and benefits of working people, it would appear that the Oregonian was taken over by sycophants of the Koch Brothers and Rupert Murdoch. The Oregonian is clearly the local propaganda arm of the One Percent in their war against the middle class.

Adams does not seem to be on board with the Koch Brothers, but he is under pressure and apparently will act on Sunday.

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