Election Results Indicate Huge Mandate for New Trade Pacts?

 Apparently that is how the DC-insider crowd saw the elections last week. The elite media were filled with news and opinion pieces on how the election opened the door for the approval of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Pact (TTIP). According to the purveyors of elite opinion, this is one of the key areas on which the Republicans in Congress and President Obama can agree.That assessment is striking since few, if any, of the winning candidates in last week's election made a point of running on their support of these agreements. Nor did President Obama highlight his work on these pacts in his re-election campaign. In fact, the last thing most voters probably remember President Obama saying about trade was his pledge to renegotiate NAFTA when he was running for president the first time, back in 2008.The turn of the leadership of both parties and the centers of elite opinion to these trade deals shows the incredible contempt they have for the general public and the political process. We just completed lengthy and expensive campaigns where they had ample opportunity to push the case for these deals. Instead we got panicky commercials highlighting everything from the Ebola threat to ISIS beheadings.Read More.Source: The Huffington Post/Dean Baker 

Health insurers win midterm election!

There are several provisions of the Affordable Care Act that the insurance industry would like the next Congress to change. If insurers get what they want — and with the GOP in control of both houses of Congress, it’s a decent bet they will — Wall Street will be exuberant indeed.Just the anticipation of what a Republican controlled Congress might be able to pull off has put insurance company shareholders in good humor. Within 24 hours of knowing that Mitch McConnell would replace Harry Reid as Senate Majority Leader, investors were active buyers of health insurance stock. In fact, the share prices of five of the six largest for-profit health insurers — Cigna, Health Net, Humana, UnitedHealthcare and WellPoint/Anthem — reached their highest points in a year last Wednesday. Some even reached historic highs. Aetna was the only one that fell short of reaching a 52-week high, but only by pocket change.Even though there is still chatter about repealing Obamacare, GOP leaders and insurance company executives understand that isn’t likely to happen. And they really don’t want it to. Insurance firms and their shareholders actually love the billions of dollars in new revenue they’re getting as a result of the law’s requirement that most of us buy coverage from private insurers. They’re pretty confident that the cash will continue to flow, because, even with Republican control of Capitol Hill, the law will not be repealed.Read More.Source: The Center For Public Integrity/Wendell Potter

The GOP’s poisonous double-speak: Thomas Frank on how Republicans hijacked the midterms

Last week, with the Republican campaign robo-calls coming one after another over the phone in suburban Kansas City — at least a dozen of them every day, the right-wing super PACs’ version of a World War I artillery barrage — I picked out one phrase from the hailstorm of words: “Washington’s liberal class.”

That phrase, delivered with sneering emphasis on the second word, may have been a key to the whole confusing affair. Consider the many ironies of the 2014 elections. Georgia, the state with the highest unemployment in the nation, just elected as its United States senator a businessman who is “proud” of his career of outsourcing. The voters of Illinois overwhelmingly approved a referendum calling for a higher minimum wage, but they also chose as their governor a Wall Street type who in the past has asserted that the minimum wage ought to be reduced or eliminated. And the public as a whole, driven to fury by the spectacle of Washington gridlock, just handed over the U. S. Senate to a party that has enshrined obstructionism as its most precious article of faith.Low turnout is one reason for these contradictory results. Big money is a second. But a third reason voters did these futile, clashing things is that this is our fourth hard-times election in a row. Lashing out blindly and in all directions against the powerful — against low wages as well as against a comfortable “class” that is amply represented in Washington — is still our political default position, some six years after the financial crisis and the Wall Street bailout. For many Americans, the recession is still on. They know that their region hasn’t recovered … that their household wealth isn’t coming back … that people like them no longer have a shot at the middle-class life in which they were raised.Read More.Source: Salon.Com/Thomas Frank

Republicans will now taste their bitter harvest

In the early 3rd century B.C., after King Pyrrhus of Epirus again took brutal casualties in defeating the Romans, he told one person who offered congratulations, “If we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans, we shall be utterly ruined.” In his more sober moments, Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), about to achieve his lifelong ambition of becoming Senate majority leader, may wonder whether he, too, has achieved a pyrrhic victory.Republicans are still crowing about the sweeping victories in 2014 that give them control of both houses of Congress. They will set the agenda, deciding what gets considered, investigated and voted on. Their ideas will drive the debate.But Republicans have no mandate because they offered no agenda. Republicans reaped the rewards of McConnell’s scorched-earth strategy, obstructing President Obama relentlessly, helping to create the failure that voters would pin on the party in power. But the collateral damage is that the “party of ‘no’ ” has no agreement on what is yes. Instead of using the years in the wilderness to develop new ideas and a clear vision, Republicans have used them only to sharpen their tongues, grow their claws and practice their backhands.Read More.Source: The Washington Post/Katrina vanden Heuvel

The Choice of the Century

The president blames himself for the Democrats' big losses Election Day."We have not been successful in going out there and letting people know what it is that we're trying to do and why this is the right direction," he said Sunday.In other words, he didn't sufficiently tout the administration's accomplishments.I respectfully disagree.If you want a single reason for why Democrats lost big on Election Day 2014 it's this: Median household income continues to drop.This is the first "recovery" in memory when this has happened.Jobs are coming back but wages aren't.Read More.Source: The Huffington Post/Robert Reich

Promising jobs report suggests Americans' earnings are rising again

Source: LATimes

Tuesday Probably Meant Nothing for 2016

The dramatic, across-the-board victory engineered by Republicans in Tuesday’s elections would seem to bode well for the party’s chance to capture the White House in 2016. The GOP took full control of Congress, flipped at least four governor’s offices from blue to red, and prompted much talk of a resurgent Republican movement.Not so fast. A more careful look at the returns significantly complicates the narrative that an American electorate, which recently tilted Democratic, has since shifted back to the Republican fold.In fact, the 2014 election results appear to say more about who did not vote than who did: Younger voters and minority communities stayed home in large numbers, as is typical during a midterm election. If trends from the last two presidential elections hold, those same groups are likely to be far more energized during the next White House campaign, making Tuesday’s results of limited value in predicting 2016.Read More.Source: Truthdig/David Sirota

A Prescription for Better Health

Here’s a typical scene in any American checkup: The doctor walks in to find the patient sitting on the table. “Well, your cholesterol is too high,” the doctor tells the patient. “I can prescribe something for it, but the real solution will be diet and exercise.”The patient leaves that day with a bottle of Lipitor and maybe a pamphlet about healthier living habits.How many times do you think the patient responds by saying, “Really, doc? Diet and exercise? I had no idea! I think I’ll take Papa John’s off my speed dial, start training for the next Boston Marathon, and gorge on kale.”Probably never.Read More.Source: OtherWords.Org/Jill Richardson

Analyst challenges predictions for Western oil booms

Spurred by hydraulic fracturing, the deep shale fields of North Dakota’s Bakken and Texas’s Eagle Ford are collectively producing two and a half million barrels of oil per day. By some measures, the boom appears to be turning to glut. Last week, the spot price of crude fell to under $80 per barrel, its lowest price in more than three years. The nationwide average price of unleaded gasoline has followed suit, dropping to $2.95 per gallon, prices not seen since the end of 2010.While drivers and other energy consumers rejoice, oil executives fear that plummeting crude oil prices signal missteps similar to those made by the natural gas industry in recent years – as unchecked production and its attendant lower oil prices erode their bottom line.Read More.Source: High Country Times/Jeremy Miller

Whose Butt Gets Kicked?

When Republicans gained the Senate majority in the recent midterm elections to consolidate congressional leadership under the GOP, it became apparent that, come January, either President Barack Obama’s butt will get kicked, or new Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s and House Speaker John Boehner’s butts will get kicked. President Obama has to decide whether he will be the kicker or the kickee.It’s too late for Obama to summon his inner Franklin Roosevelt. Now he needs to summon his inner Harry Truman and give the Do-Nothing Republicans Hell — or at least follow the example of Bill Clinton, who lost his Democratic congressional majority in 1995 — two years into his term — and had to show the new GOP congressional leaders that his veto pen worked before they would sit down for serious negotiations. And even then it took two government shutdowns before the Republicans got serious.Obama already has faced down the Republicans over a shutdown in October 2013 after Teabag Republicans, led by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), resisted adoption of a continuing resolution for appropriations. The Senate takeover emboldened Teabagger extremists who think the 16-day government shutdown in 2013 didn’t go far enough in rolling back the Obama menace. And many of them figure that, since they won in the midterms, the shutdown worked!Read More.Source: The Progressive Populist/EditorialObama faced the first of his first challenges on Nov. 20 when he announced that he would implement some immigration reforms by executive order after a bipartisan Senate bill was bottled up in the House for the past year and a half. His next challenge is to try to get Congress to approve a continuing resolution on appropriations by Dec. 11 to keep the government running into the new year. Republicans warned that Obama's executive orde to defer deportation of four million undocumented immigrants with family ties to citizens or green-card holders will poison his relations with Republicans in Congress. As if there were any good faith among those Republicans, who plotted on the night Obama was inaugurated to obstruct him at every turn. One of the conspirators, Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas) even suggested the GOP follow the model of the Taliban in its legislative insurgency. 

Don't Soul-Search—Stiffen Your Backbone

It’s a time-honored tradition. After months of covering the midterm elections through a prism of polls and tactics, pundits will shift their focus to the defeated party’s so-called season of “soul-searching.”As a Democrat, I’m disappointed in last Tuesday’s results. But as a progressive, I know my party need not search for its soul — but rather, its backbone.The truth is that the Democratic Party has core values that are very much in sync with most Americans.We believe in taking dead aim at the income inequality that infects our communities — from big cities like New York, to small towns and rural areas across the United States.We believe that the wealthy should pay their fair share so we can lift people out of poverty and grow our middle class.And we believe in rules that prevent big corporations and Wall Street banks from unraveling workers’ pensions, suppressing employees’ wages and benefits, and rigging the system to reward wealth instead of work.This year, too many Democratic candidates lost sight of those core principles — opting instead to clip their progressive wings in deference to a conventional wisdom that says bold ideas aren’t politically practical.To working people, it showed Democratic weakness — a weak commitment to the change desperately sought by struggling families, and a weak alternative to a Republican philosophy that has held America back.Bold, progressive ideas win elections.Just ask Sen. Al Franken (DFL-Minn.), who has fought fearlessly to rein in Wall Street, and won by a larger margin on Tuesday than President Obama did in Minnesota in 2012.Or Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), who never backed away from his support for Obamacare — a federal program that is already working to reduce income inequality, and promises to do more to address the inequality crisis than anything out of Washington in generations. Merkley won re-election in Oregon by six points more than Obama won that state in 2012.Read More.Source: The Progressive Populist/New York City Mayor BILL DE BLASIO 

America’s prospects are promising indeed

Two-thirds of Americans believe the country is on the wrong track, a poll number that has not shifted much in three years. The midterm election results were just another reflection of this pervasive discontent. And yet, looking at the rest of the world, what’s striking is how well the United States is doing relative to other major economies. Japan is back in a recession and Germany has barely avoided slipping into one, which would have been its third since 2008. President Obama says the United States has produced more jobs in its recovery than the rest of the industrialized world put together.

Why is this? Many believe that the American economy has some inherent advantages over its major competitors — a more flexible structure, stronger entrepreneurial traditions and a more demographically vibrant society. Along comes a fascinating new book that says you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Read More.Source: The Washington Post, Opinion, Fareed Zakaria

After the Midterms: Time to Fight Back

After the most expensive and negative midterm elections in American history, Republicans have gained control of the Senate. That’s going to make it possible for a GOP-dominated Congress to follow Mitch McConnell’s lead by advancing the agenda of the right-wing billionaires and corporate interests that pay for elections while neglecting the issues that matter to the great majority of Americans.So what will they be doing? McConnell told the Koch brothers and their allies that Republicans will seek to undermine President Obama’s ability to implement programs by writing spending bills that “go after them on healthcare, on financial services, on the Environmental Protection Agency, across the board.” But Obama is not without options. He has a bully pulpit, the authority to issue executive orders and a veto pen—and he must use them all.Obama also has history on his side. Plenty of presidents have suffered severe setbacks in the middle of second terms, including Ronald Reagan, Dwight Eisenhower and Franklin Roosevelt. Those presidents got Supreme Court and federal court nominees confirmed, they enacted budgets, they prepared the country for great challenges and they prepared their parties for comebacks—often in the very next presidential election. In his response to this year’s setback, Obama should borrow from those of his most successful predecessors: don’t give McConnell an inch. Keep campaigning, get the people on your side and write the narrative of the next two years. The risk is that, seeking to “get things done” and appease his Wall Street backers, Obama will work out compromises with Republicans that alienate his base among struggling families, students, immigrants, women and communities of color. This is the “rising electorate” that sent him into office in 2008 and 2012, and any “grand bargains” he strikes that undermine the precarious economic security of these groups will carry a significant political cost for him and for the Democratic Party: just imagine the damage if the lackluster turnout among these groups that spelled defeat for so many Democrats this cycle is repeated in 2016.Read More.Source: The Nation/The Editors

Chinese, GOP Agree Non-Rich Shouldn't Vote

Speaking just like an American Republican, the Communist Chinese-appointed leader of Hong Kong, Leung Chun-ying, said last week that if the state granted democratic rights to its poor and working class, they could dominate elections and choose leaders who would meet their needs.If Hong Kong’s 99 percenters picked their leaders, Mr. Leung said, “Then you would end up with that kind of politics and policies.”  To ensure politics and policies favoring Hong Kong’s one percent, Mr. Leung insists that a committee appointed in Beijing approve all candidates to succeed him.Mr. Leung fears rule by the majority – just as U.S. Republicans do. It’s the reason the GOP has launched a massive voter suppression campaign across the country. Republicans believe in rule by and for the one percent. To accomplish that, they must do what Mr. Leung and the Chinese Communist party did: foil democracy. That’s the GOP goal when it subverts America’s precious one person-one vote equality. Every American who holds democracy dear must do whatever it takes to defy GOP attempts to deny them access to the ballot next week.Read More.Source: DailyKos/Leo W. Gerard

Justice for Edward Snowden

It is time for President Obama to offer clemency to Edward Snowden, the courageous U.S. citizen who revealed the Orwellian reach of the National Security Agency’s sweeping surveillance of Americans. His actions may have broken the law, but his act, as the New York Times editorialized, did the nation “a great service.”In an interview that the Nation magazine is publishing this week, Nation Contributing Editor Stephen Cohen and I asked Snowden his definition of patriotism. He sensibly argues patriotism is not “acting to benefit the government,” but to “act on behalf of one’s country. . . . You’re not patriotic just because you back whoever’s in power today. . . . You’re patriotic when you work to improve the lives of the people of your country,” including protecting their rights.Read More.The Washington Post, Opinions/Katrina Vanden Heuvel

Obama Administration Let Opponents Define the Affordable Care Act

The Democrats’ strategy seems to have been to say as little as possible about why reform was needed and how the final law would protect us from insurance industry abuses.

When I saw the news coverage of White House health care adviser Jonathan Gruber’s remarks, in which he essentially called Americans stupid, I thought of the old saying, “With friends like that, who needs enemies?”My next thought was, who’s being stupid here?Gruber is an MIT health economist who worked on health care reform with both Mitt Romney, when he was governor of Massachusetts, and the Obama administration. In fact, he’s one of the reasons Obamacare looks so much like Romneycare, which Massachusetts lawmakers enacted in 2006.During remarks he made at the Health Economists Conference at the University of Pennsylvania last year, Gruber claimed that the Obama administration and Congressional Democrats had no choice but to keep the public in the dark, and even mislead folks, about certain aspects of the reform bill as it was being written.Read More.Source: Wendell Potter

Rational Science vs. Paranoia

On Oct. 24, President Obama hugged Nina Pham, the first person to be infected with Ebola in the United States. Ms. Pham, a nurse who had been declared disease free by the National Institutes of Health, did not represent a contagion risk to the President, or anybody else, but the hug was symbolic. While we do have things to fear other than fear itself, the hug was an important symbol. It was intended to be. The Washington Times (not ever to be confused with the Washington Post) was outraged, and under the headline “Obama Choreographed Hug with Ebola Victim.” Mark Knoller, the White House correspondent for CBS News Tweeted “Still photographers said they heard Pres Obama tell Nurse Nina Pham words to the effect of: let’s give a hug for the cameras.”The picture itself seems to deliver the message. Ms. Pham has a huge grin, President Obama has a look of total indifference – which is perfectly okay. If he appeared to be enjoying the hug the Washington Times and NewsMax would have had something to say about that too. Ebola is scary, but we’ve been through something like this before. Laura Helmuth of Slate made the important point that while President Obama welcomed Ms. Pham and did hug her, President Reagan never even said the word AIDS – at least not in the disease context.Read More.Source: The Populist/Sam Uretsky

GOP leader’s sneaky ’16 plan: How Kevin McCarthy hopes to win back the White House

I wrote a little piece a while back about the great California hope, the new House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, in which I pointed out that his alleged moderation was as exaggerated as the idea that he was chosen for his ideology.  Majority leaders become majority leaders because they develop a network of support within the caucus through judicious use of both money and influence to build their power. McCarthy was a perfect example of that and ascended to his throne fairly effortlessly when Eric Cantor was ignominiously unseated by an unknown primary opponent. He’s a very savvy pol.

So it’s not surprising that over the weekend the entire village began to kvell in unison at the news that McCarthy was lecturing Republicans about the need to “govern” lest they be locked out of the presidency again in 2016.  If there is one thing the political establishment loves more than anything it’s a party leader scolding his own party, especially when they perceive it to be a call for a more genteel, centrist approach that doesn’t challenge the status quo in any measurable way.Now in this case, there might be good reason to hope that Kevin McCarthy was putting some of his extremist colleagues on notice that their more outlandish shenanigans were not going to be tolerated any longer. No more government shutdowns, no more indiscriminate budget slashing, no more ludicrous investigations into Benghazi! or the IRS.  Now is the time for the Republicans to show they are indeed the grown-ups in the room and start working across the aisle with Democrats to get things done for the good of the nation.  Unfortunately, McCarthy doesn’t live in Republican Bizarro world and neither do we so the chances of that happening are about as good as the chance that Jerry Brown is going down to defeat next week.  No, McCarthy is doing something a little bit different and if you parse his words carefully you’ll see what it is.Read More.Source: Salon/Heather Digby Parton

GOP’s sad new rescue fantasy: George W. Bush presents Jeb Bush 2016!

As if to underscore the GOP’s long-term leadership deficit even as a midterm victory looms, the Bush family announced a new product launch over the weekend: Jeb Bush 2016.

“No question,” son Jeb Jr. told the New York Times, “people are getting fired up about it — donors and people who have been around the political process for a while, people he’s known in Tallahassee when he was governor. The family, we’re geared up either way.” His brother George P. Bush, running for Texas land commissioner, told ABC’s “This Week” that it’s “more than likely” his father will run. “If you had asked me a few years back, I would have said it was less likely,” he said.So they’re “fired up,” huh?  Maybe they think if they appropriate Barack Obama’s old slogan, no one will notice they’re trying to make sure that three GOP presidents in a row will come from the same family. It’s as though Republicans have given up on generating new leadership democratically and are handing it down dynastically from now on.The project’s cheerleader, according to the Times, is former President George W. Bush, the guy whose own White House victory essentially doomed Jeb’s dreams. Now W. is rallying the Bush forces, boasting about urging his younger brother to run, even while he jokes with Fox News, “I don’t think he liked it that his older brother was pushing him.” Older brother’s famous sadistic streak obviously endures.Read More.Source: Salon/Joan Walsh

Thomas Frank: “We are such losers”

That we are living through an endless repeat of the 1970s is becoming more apparent all the time. Nostalgia and retro culture burn as brightly today as they did in the era of “Happy Days” and “American Graffiti,” while distrust and suspicion of government hover at near-Watergate levels. Disaster dreams are everywhere, just as they were in the days of “The Towering Inferno” and Three Mile Island. The culture wars, the 1970s’ No. 1 gift to American politics, still drag on and on, while the New Right, the decade’s other great political invention, effortlessly rejuvenates itself. Jerry Brown is governor of California again. The Kansas City Royals are a good team.

No reminiscence of that decade of malaise would be complete without mentioning Jimmy Carter, the president who—fairly or not—will be forever associated with national drift and decline and all the other horrors that were eventually swept away by the Reagan magisterium. Indeed, comparing the hapless Carter to whoever currently leads the Democratic Party remains a powerful shibboleth for American conservatives, and in 2011 and 2012 Republicans indulged in this favorite simile without hesitation.Read More.Source:Salon/Thomas Frank