The spreading Occupy movement has seen one after another sit-in, protest camp or march brutally and inexcusably assaulted by paramilitary police actions, using chemical agents and other weapons of war, against unarmed, nonviolent citizens exercising their basic constitutional rights. The result has been a rash of unfettered violence across the world against pro-democracy advocates.

In Egypt, officials have openly said they should be allowed to use military violence against civilian demonstrators, because it is being done across the United States. After the atrocities of Oakland, when police fired rubber bullets, flash-bang grenades and tear gas canisters at point-blank range at penned-in, unarmed demonstrators, sending ex-Marine Scott Olsen to the hospital with a fractured skull and brain injuries, the use of paramilitary tactics seems only to have spread.

In New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg last week staged an unannounced, midnight raid on the original Occupy Wall Street protest site, using chemical weapons, LRAD combat sound cannon, and police officers in riot gear swinging wildly with billy clubs against anyone in sight, regardless of threat or posture. There has been no penalty, and no punishment, for officers engaged in aggravated assault against civilians.

Mayor Bloomberg deployed counter-terrorist police helicopters to the scene of the violent assault, to prevent news helicopters from filming what occurred. Press were banned from the site, by what authority it remains unclear. At least 26 journalists were assaulted, beaten, injured, and/or detained, on the night of the Zuccotti Park raid. There was a planned, deliberate use of violence and combat tactics against unarmed, nonviolent, even sleeping and prone demonstrators.

The brutality of the raid was so severe that when City Councilman Ydanis Rodriguez (D-Washington Heights) rushed to the site to observe and to make the case against the use of violence to disperse the protesters, he was assaulted by police and arrested for disorderly conduct. According to the New York Daily News: Several people detained with him told me Rodriguez was bleeding badly from a gash in his forehead. Still, by 6 p.m., he had not been arraigned and his lawyer, Leo Glickman, had not been allowed to see him.

Glickman says his client is not even being afforded the basic due process protections afforded to any arrestee and that the citys treatment of the protest and of the councilman is an effort to silence the movement. At least one retired state Supreme Court justice also found her attempts to provide legal observation to the raid obstructed. The Daily News reports the scene as follows:

Retired Supreme Court Judge Karen Smith can’t believe what she saw this week. At the urging of her son, who joined the Zuccotti Park protests weeks ago, Smith had volunteered to be a legal observer in case of mass arrests.

She received a text message early Tuesday that a bust was imminent, so she got to Zuccotti around 1:30 a.m. As she exited the subway at Broadway and Dey St., she met a wall of cops in riot gear who were preventing people from getting anywhere near the park.

“There was a black woman standing next to me,” Smith said. “She kept frantically telling the cops her daughter was in the park and she wanted to make sure the girl was okay.”

“All of a sudden, a cop takes his baton and cracks her in the head,” Smith said. “She hadn’t done a thing. Then they started chasing people down the street.”

Smith’s efforts to get police to recognize her as a legal observer proved futile. Likewise, several reporters who were arrested while covering the protest found their press credentials worthless.

Crimes were committed by authorities that directly violate the Constitution of the United States and its fundamental protections for free speech, freedom of the press and the freedom of the people to peaceably assemble. The denial of access to counsel for some and the barring of press and legal observers from the scene is a clear attempt to circumvent the right of the people to petition their government for the redress of grievances. Some First Amendment advocates have accused the city of barring press and legal observers in order to 1) undermine the evidentiary process and 2) allow for impunity in the use of extreme force by police.

Across the United States, we are witnessing, sadly, one after another mayor decide that the free exercise of constitutional liberties is a threat to public order, only to deploy paramilitary tactics to crush peaceful protests.

There are accusations of a coordinated planning strategy among mayors to determine what level of force they will deploy, and by what means, to crush the demonstrations. Some mayors offices have claimed the right to secrecy for security reasons, and there are Freedom of Information filings being made to learn who knew what when, and who gave which order that led to police firing on demonstrators, or using chemical weapons in unprovoked attacks against citizens.

In Egypt, where the nonviolent Tahrir Square uprising brought down the dictator Hosni Mubarak, in just 18 days between January 25 and February 11 of this year, authorities are now openly citing the actions of American mayors and police forces as justification for their use of extreme violence against nonviolent civilian demonstrators calling for genuine democratic reform. Mayors Bloomberg, Emanuel, Quan and others, are aiding and abetting the use of extreme violence to crush pro-democracy movements across the world.

This is not hyperbole. This is not interpretation. This is what is happening:

• In the streets of New York City, paramilitary forces were deployed, using tactics designed for armed combat in a warzone, using weapons designed specifically for combat in a war zone, deploying chemical weapons against unarmed civilians and banning all press coverage of the event.
• In the streets of Oakland, police shot a former Marine in the face at point-blank range, while he was penned in, and despite his having no weapon of any kind, posing no threat to anyone, and doing nothing of any kind in violation of any law. When he fell to the ground, gushing blood and good samaritans rushed to his aid, which not one of the police present did, an Oakland police officer fired a flash-bang grenade apparently loaded with tear gas directly into the huddle of people trying to help him, as if to finish off the protest with one last shot.
• At UC Davis, police walked along a row of nonviolent student protesters linking arms, and deployed a chemical weapon directly into their faces, with reckless and abject disregard for their health, their wellbeing, their rights, the rule of law or their own obligation to protect and serve.

In each case, the authorities behaved in direct contravention of the Constitution of the United States, and carried out brutal, wanton, physical assault against unarmed civilians. The violence against journalists in New York City is among the most worrying developments, because it suggests a depraved disregard for American law at the highest levels and directly mirrors the kind of planned atrocities being carried out in countries where corrupt regimes are actively trying to stamp out all pro-democracy protest.

In Egypt, the escalation of official violence against protesters has left 33 people dead since Saturday. The lesson of military impunity taught by Mayor Bloombergs assault on demonstrators has been learned, and is being treated almost as legal precedent by corrupt regimes unwilling to consent to any genuine open democratic process. The consequences are increased impunity, increased suffering, the deaths of innocents and an attempt across the region to roll back the democratic gains of the Arab spring.

People across the United States should stand together, regardless of party or ideology, and demand that there never again be even one instance of law enforcement being deployed to use force against any civilians exercising their basic rights.

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Related:

• The Oakland Crackdown (discussion)
• What is the Meaning of This?
• Occupy Wall Street, with a People-centered Investment Bank

The above video shows the altercations leading up to the unprovoked macing of two women by an NYPD detective inspector, identified by online activists as Anthony Bologna, a finding confirmed by the NYPD itself. The incident has raised serious questions about what the planned response to the protests was, and whether there were orders in place for officers to intervene to halt the peaceful demonstrations. In the video, there are numerous incidents where individual officers, apparently acting in a disorganized and spontaneous fashion, physically strike, tackle, drag or pepper-spray unarmed civilians on a public street.

It is clear that police officers do heroic work in service of the public order, and that their active role in promoting the rule of law and keeping the peace is vital to the functioning of an open, democratic, civil society. But it is also clear that citizens cannot permit the justice system to be corrupted by undisciplined, unruly or even violent individuals who betray their uniform and their oath to serve and to protect the public. The NYPD is facing a decision, about whether to side with an absolute ban on unprovoked assaults of unarmed civilian bystanders legally entitled to both assemble and to use public streets for personal business or to condone the unjustified, unlawful physical assault of such persons by officers operating beyond their legal authority.

The choice is that stark, and the City of New York should make clear that there is no moral dilemma to consider: any unprovoked assault by an officer of the law against any unarmed civilian—including where the officer believed he was being forced to listen to uncomfortable words and slogans—must be treated as a violent, unprovoked assault, not as the lawful conduct of police business. All accused should be accorded appropriate due process, but unlawful physical violence against civilians cannot go unpunished if the rule of law and the integrity of the authorities of the City of New York are to be credible.

It is ultimately citizens, not agents of the government, who govern in the American system of democracy. It is citizens who have the higher standing before the law. Citizens are subject to reasonable prohibitions enacted in law, but so are law-enforcement officers. It is the law-enforcement officers whose freedom to act without deference to others is constrained by the Constitutional principle that only those powers specifically enumerated in the Constitution can accrue to the government.

No such provision exists for treating unarmed civilians as hostile combatants simply for walking on a public street, gathering to chant slogans, or discussing matters of controversy. In fact, numerous amendments to the Constitution specifically prohibit such actions by police.

The First Amendment guarantees the right to free assembly, to free expression and to petition the government for redress of grievances. For police to claim they were forced into violent acts because people expressed their views, gathered in public or voiced complaints about police activity, is as absurd as it is irrational. It is not a legal defense.

The Fourth Amendment protects the rights of all individuals against “unreasonable search and seizure”. Altercations in which police lay hands on unarmed civilians without legal just cause are incidents occurring outside the law, and which directly violate the Constitutional protection of civil liberties. Such incidents are an affront to due process and an abdication of any special authority under the law.

Any incident in which physical force is used to coerce behavior, coerce movement, retaliate for words spoken, or otherwise improperly seize control of the person or the property of any civilian, is an aggression against the citizens of the United States generally and against those individuals personally, and should be treated as a criminal act. We write with a spirit of genuine sympathy for the hard-working people of the NYPD, and for their normally world-leading professional service to the public. But we believe that as citizens, we all have a right to demand that no arm of our government ever be forced to undergo the shame and corruption of direct association with such unlawful behavior or such fundamentally undemocratic pretensions to unassigned powers.

The City of New York has an opportunity, provided by the nonviolent protest movement seeking to use purely peaceful, entirely lawful, strictly democratic means of protest, to show to the world what a genuinely stable, upstanding, and secure civil society does when there is widespread public dissatisfaction. The City of New York has an opportunity to show it stands with the people who comprise its body politic, the people who in fact govern and whose consent gives legitimacy to those who serve in government office.

The choice is clear: reprimand, suspend, investigate and punish—according to the evidence and the law—all acts of physical violence against unarmed civilians. Do this, and show deference to the rule of law, the virtues of a vibrant civil society, and the need for an active, informed citizenry. The soul of the City of New York is now on trial.

The four coordinated hijackings, resulting in three deliberate attacks and one downed passenger jet, took 2,977 innocent lives and sowed fear and dismay across the world. They were acts of unconscionable evil intended to not only harm innocents and terrify the wider population, but to destabilize American democracy itself, and derail a people’s journey through history, possibly to erode its most virtuous contributions.

It was a clear, sunny morning and the first plane crashing into the North Tower of the World Trade Center had sparked a sustained global news flash, bringing hundreds of millions of eyes to the television footage. There was confusion and disbelief, and just as it was becoming clear there must have been a devastating loss of life, a massive fireball engulfed the top half of the South Tower, clearly signaling a deliberate terrorist attack was underway.

Less than 2 minutes later, the White House chief of staff told the president, then in a public event with schoolchildren, that “America is under attack.” A third plane flew into the Pentagon, headquarters of the US Dept. of Defense, while the fourth crashed into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after passengers reportedly made a fateful and heroic decision to rush the cockpit and take back the plane from the hijackers.

In the days after the attacks, it was often said such heinous acts would not be allowed to change our open, democratic culture or to reduce our commitment to moral leadership in the world. Pres. Bush made a visible, conscious effort to ask that no one treat Muslims or people of Arabic origin or descent, as anything other than members of an open, democratic society, as neighbors and possibly as victims, of the attacks.

But in the months and years that followed, the pressures and temptations inherent in legislating and prosecuting the war on terror drew the US federal government into planning and implementing policies that marked an appreciable and concerning detour away from many of our most cherished shared principles.

We have suffered, in the aftermath of the attacks, fully a decade of war. From the standpoint of an idealist democracy, or of just war theory, from the standpoint of a civilization committed to peaceful coexistence and negotiated outcomes, war is failure. It is the failure of peace, of the institutions of peaceful negotiation; it is the threat of a descent into chaos. War tests the moral fiber of a society more than any other experience.

In one of the most emotional and solemn of the speeches given to commemorate the legacy of those lost, Vice President Joseph Biden noted that “Never before in our history, has America asked so much over such a sustained period of an all volunteer force. I can say without fear of contradiction or being accused of exaggeration that the 9/11 generation ranks among the greatest our nation has ever produced.”

He spoke of 4,478 “fallen angels” who died in Iraq, another 1,648 who gave their lives in Afghanistan, over ten years, many of them in recent weeks, and the more than 40,000 wounded in both wars. Biden has visited the wounded soldiers many times, and said “I am awed not only by their capability, but by their sacrifices, today and every day.”

To this day, military strategists disagree about whether going to war as a response was a major strategic blunder. It was important, and positive, to oust the Taliban from power, to end the murderous regime of Saddam Hussein, but the unity and the worldwide human fabric of sympathy that grew immediately after the 9/11 attacks bled away as a politics of division and confrontation took hold.

Some professional politicians deliberately adopted the attacks as a “wedge issue”, and sought to paint rivals to their political philosophy or to their job security as enemies of the state. A naturally occurring sense of democratic, civic unity was replaced by a push for ideological uniformity. Many Americans began to feel, for the first time in their lives, as if dissent, or even critical thinking, was not welcome in the public discourse.

The very idea of engaged citizenship was challenged by a prevailing attitude of hardline politics, and for many, fear and suspicion. In retrospect, it may have been possible to depose the Taliban and to counter Al Qaeda, without ever going to war in Iraq, without adopting interrogation techniques borrowed from Cambodian death camps, and without giving in to the suspicion that due process was somehow a risky departure from the best service of justice in a free society.

In retrospect, there may have been better ways to channel the collective emotional upheaval that followed the attacks. Historians were already talking of how quickly the political capital of the moment was “squandered”, as less than two years after the attacks, an aggressive, unilateralist drive had totally overtaken American foreign policy. There was, for several years, a great risk that American democracy would be forever changed, and many of its most vital ideals eroded.

But today, in northern Virginia, Vice President Biden reminded us of something else: the attackers misunderstood the nature of the event they had planned and its likely impact on the nation they were targeting. While the risk was there that our culture could be comprehensively destabilized by the grief and anger that follow such an event, Biden suggested we were ultimately protected against that deviation by something Al Qaeda may never have understood:

With the fully restored Pentagon behind him, Biden intoned: “The true source of American power does not lie within that building, because as Americans, we draw our strength from the rich tapestry of our people.” He added that “The true legacy of 9/11 is that our spirit is mightier, the bonds that unite us are thicker, and the resolve is firmer than the millions of tons of limestone and concrete that make up that great edifice behind me.”

Biden explained the miscalculation of a small group of extremists who “never imagined” that the killing of 3,000 people would inspire 3,000,000 to volunteer for military service, to strengthen and defend a population of over 300,000,000. He spoke of the “sleeping giant” that was awakened by the shock and horror of the attacks. He was speaking not of a will to violence or retaliation, but of a spirit of aid to one’s fellow citizens.

In the hours after the attacks on New York City, a fleet of ferries, fishing boats, tug boats, small craft, commercial vessels and patrol boats, spontaneously gathered around lower Manhattan. The United States Coast Guard then sent out a message to “all available boats” to “report to Governor’s Island”. Hundreds of boats converged on the city to assist in the evacuation, arriving at what witnesses describe as astonishing speed.

After the North Tower collapsed into its footprint, engulfing lower Manhattan in a cloud of toxic dust, heat, smoke and debris, tens of thousands of evacuees—some injured, some in shock, many hysterical with panic, some just acting in service of those around them—were flooding the waterfront. Some were jumping into the water, despite the heavy boat traffic, desperate to get off the island and if possible swim to safety.

In what is now referred to as the great Manhattan “boatlift”, nearly 500,000 civilian refugees were evacuated in just nine hours. It was the largest evacuation by sea in history. By comparison, the legendary military evacuation of Dunkirk, during some of the darkest days of World War II, evacuated 350,000 French and British soldiers from France to Britain.

The great Manhattan boatlift was possible because conscientious citizen volunteers from across the region shot into action, heading into the unknowable dangers of an unprecedented disaster zone, risking their lives and livelihoods to help total strangers in desperate need. This was emblematic of a society infused with a strong sense of public trust and civic responsibility, where citizenship and shared destiny are implicit in our sense of who we are.

Ten years after the attacks of September 11, 2001, we have seen a spiritual recovery, in which people recognize that the values of such a society cannot be cast aside for any temporary sense of security. Our politics have seen a reversal, in which an unprecedented number of people voted, in 2008, for a politics of unity and civic engagement. And the hotly contested political campaigns have continued, with fevered disagreement over policy and ideology, but we can, perhaps say, that the freedom to disagree so vehemently is a celebration of the virtues of a free and open society.

Vice President Biden said to the families of victims today, “My prayer for you is that ten years later when you think of them, ten years later when you think of them, that it brings a smile to your lips instead of a pain in your heart.” There are many ways in which the legacy of the 9/11 attacks has long since been reclaimed from both the terrorists and the hardliners, and has come to inspire a commitment to service and shared responsibility.

Speaking of the bond between her family and the family of her brother’s great friend, coworker and fellow victim of the 9/11 attacks, Debra Epps today said, at the opening of the World Trade Center’s new 9/11 Memorial park, that the tragedy had brought the lesson that “People really do catch you, when you fall. It’s been a blessing.”

There are societies where unity in service of the civic space and one’s fellow citizens is a rare, if not unthinkable eventuality, and there are societies that are strong because free people naturally and voluntarily engage with each other with a sense of holding the civic space in trust, with a sense of commitment to the virtues and the vulnerabilities of their common humanity.

Ten years after the attacks of 9/11, the United States has been through many choices, many complexes of complicating choices, in response to the attacks. Many of those choices were controversial, and many have been reversed. Many curbs on civil liberties are still in place, and top officials disagree vehemently about whether there needs to be a trade-off between commitment to Constitutional protections of civil liberties and security.

Now, we enter a new period, in which withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan is already underway, a sometimes clumsy and always complicated process of nation-building is giving way to remote security actions, forceful “smart diplomacy” and a cooperative effort to prevent civil war in both countries. Osama bin Laden, and a number of “second-in-command” and “third-in-command” Al Qaeda operatives have been killed.

Some say the struggle against militant groups with “global reach” may be entering a more conscious deliberative phase, where the liberty-security tradeoff is not seen as being so economical. There is a hunger for reviving a less militaristic civic space, in which the cooperative voluntary citizenship of free people is the strength and the hope of a great democracy, in which the value of the service of millions of volunteers can be truly honored as an expression of their selflessness.

9/11 should, after this 10th anniversary, and in the aftermath of the deviation from and restoration of core values that we have undergone, become a national day of solemn recognition, collaborative restoration, and an affirmation of our civic space, in which citizenship is a sacred trust and human interest in the principal goal of our activity. It should be a day of national reflection and of the reaffirmation of the value of an open, democratic and voluntary civic space.

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Cross-posted from Independents of Principle

A return to people-centered investment can motivate the flow of private capital

As I go back and look over what was being written about the economy, and the federal budget, the lost Clinton surpluses, falling wages, and the property bubble, throughout George W. Bush’s second term in office, it is clear the signs were there throughout that a major financial collapse was coming. Many observers, some more astute than others, predicted a correction was in the offing, without having to depend on very complex analysis.

In fact, simple arithmetic sufficed: there was not enough private wealth being generated in the Bush economy to sustain generalized economic growth. Millions of people were not earning enough to pay back what they owed. The mortgage industry was too reliant on refinancing to make existing loans payable—too often, the logic was: take out a second loan to pay your first. Cost of living was soaring while wages were falling, and Bush’s budgets were essentially pretending the two most expensive wars in US history were not real spending.

Now, in 2011, with the benefit of hindsight, we have learned that economic growth was substantially slower, at least in 2008, than we had previously thought. Some defend the Bush administration, saying the numbers could not be known adequately then, that the measures were flawed, or that we have expanded economic transparency generally since then, and so now know more than we could have then.

From The Economist:

ON DECEMBER 16th, 2008, President-Elect Barack Obama met in Chicago with key members of his economic team to discuss their response to the deteriorating economic situation. Just two weeks earlier, the Bureau of Labour Statistics reported that 533,000 jobs had been lost in November, after a decline of 302,000 in October. According to the latest output figures, the economy had contracted by 0.5% in the third quarter, and much worse was expected of the fourth. …

President Obama was inaugurated on January 20th, and a stimulus bill was introduced in the House of Representatives on January 26th. A stimulus package worth $819 billion passed in the House just two days later.

Two days after that, Americans received grim news about the economy: in the fourth quarter of 2008, GDP contracted at a 3.8% annual pace—the worst quarterly performance since the deep recession of 1982.

What we now know, however, is that those reports—which were the mathematical foundation for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and the Obama administration’s belief that unemployment could be kept to 8%—were radical understatements of the economic chaos that was unfolding.

In fact, as The Economist report continues:

Output in the third and fourth quarters fell by 3.7% and 8.9%, respectively, not at 0.5% and 3.8% as believed at the time. Employment was also falling much faster than estimated. Some 820,000 jobs were lost in January, rather than the 598,000 then reported. In the three months prior to the passage of stimulus, the economy cut loose 2.2m workers, not 1.8m. In January, total employment was already 1m workers below the level shown in the official data.

When Obama was implementing the stimulus, the official numbers from George W. Bush’s administration showed negative growth in the third and fourth quarters of 2008 to be 0.5% and 3.8%, respectively. In fact, the reality, never shown to Obama or any top policy-makers in Washington until two years after the Recovery Act was law, was negative growth of 3.7% and 8.9% in the last two quarters of 2008.

Both of those figures were worse than anything seen in nearly 20 years. The fourth quarter decline of 8.9% was the worst since the double-digit single-quarter decline of 1957. And there were very good reasons to worry that GDP was being artificially inflated by anomalous activity: the Pentagon’s record budget, for instance, counts as GDP, but was far beyond any historically normal level, and with two concurrent wars, would eventually have to decline. (The recession of 1945, many believe, is attributable in part to the war-spending bubble deflating as the war came to an end.)

But the question then would have to be: what was really going on in the private-sector economy, if government policies were propping up GDP? Where was household wealth going to come from to fund the record, and rapidly expanding, debt Americans had taken on? How could people get this wealth, if it was not available through wages and other costs of living, aside from credit repayment, were rapidly escalating?

For trained observers watching financial markets, and who had some understanding of the “extreme investing” that was going on, and becoming mainstream, through complex mortgage-backed securities and credit-default swaps, it was clear huge swaths of the financial sector were essentially underfunded and could collapse. The property bubble, however, was visible, and was well understood—and discussed—by prominent voices as early as 2005.

The Economist magazine ran a cover story in June 2005, exploring what would happen “after the fall”, projecting a global collapse in real estate markets, severe economic fallout in Europe and the US especially, the contraction of private wealth generation for most people in those markets, and resulting budgetary shortfalls that could cripple governments and their ability to respond.

Part of the problem is the idea of GDP itself: it is a flawed measure of economic health and wellbeing, because sometimes expansion is illusory or somehow counterproductive, and contraction can be a healthy correction, resetting apparent values to where they actually lie. That something was wrong with GDP measures across the developed world was evident throughout Bush’s second term; what was not evident was how to get out of the mess without inviting economic collapse.

Is that, however, a defense of the policies enacted from 2005 to 2009? In early 2008, when George W. Bush introduced his federal budget proposal for Fiscal Year 2009, his last official budget, there was widespread concern the policies he proposed were reflective of and would invite more sustained economic malaise. He had built into the federal budget record deficits, but had not yet begun counting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as budget items—the fear was this would give a distorted impression of the nation’s fiscal health, and might conceal from key decision makers worrying revenue shortfalls that could hamper overall growth.

Interestingly, the longest recession since the Great Depression—it lasted 18 months, from Q1 2008 through Q2 2009—with such deep declines in GDP was over by the third quarter of 2009, Pres. Obama’s second full quarter in office. The GDP growth rates for that period were:

• Q1 2008: -1.8%
• Q2 2008: 1.3%
• Q3 2008: -3.7%
• Q4 2008: -8.9%

• Q1 2009: -6.7%
• Q2 2009: -0.7%
• Q3 2009: 1.6%
• Q4 2009: 3.8%

It is evident that the Recovery Act worked. Economic growth continued steadily throughout 2010, and is weaker now that the stimulus spending is beginning to wind down. There are mounting concerns that massive federal budget cuts will have a depressive effect on the economy, literally withdrawing hundreds of billions of dollars a year in economic output from the domestic economy.

For some, this is healthy and corrective. But to the average American household, it feels very much like a period of prolonged economic malaise. We can blame financial analysts, rating agencies and policy-makers, for creating the economic framework that ignored long-running pathologies and exacerbated the crisis, by using unfunded derivatives, rampant credit expansion, tricky accounting and record Defense spending, to conceal the clues, but it is more important to learn the lessons, to avoid doing the kind of things that impose crisis on ordinary working families and small businesses.

At present, the government has issued so many historic tax cuts, from 2001 right through 2011, that revenues are at historic lows, just 14% of GDP. Budgetary requirements, by contrast, are upwards of 22% of GDP. That is the cause of the record deficits, and much of it is about correcting course from a time of underfunded hyper-exploitation, in which the underpinnings of sustainable economic growth were eroded by flawed theories, flawed reporting of data, unsustainable borrowing and unwarranted gambles.

Total federal government revenue for 2010 was just $2.092 trillion, while GDP for 2010 was $14.66 trillion, so revenues amount to only 14.27% of GDP. With spending at $3.397 trillion, or 23.17% of GDP, there is a resulting stimulus shortfall to the wider economy. The deficits from the Bush years, which helped to conceal the gravity of the mounting economic crisis, have been passed to the Obama years. And now, with BEA revising its reporting for all GDP figures since 2006, in July 2011, it is clear the 2009 stimulus was less than was needed, not more.

The question is: if we were able to see the oncoming economic collapse years before it happened, but we are still living with the legacy of the policies that created it, how can we get back to the healthy growth of late 2009, early 2010, and avoid slipping into another recession? American businesses are sitting on record amounts of cash, and banks enjoy record low interest rates, to stimulate lending, yet neither are putting money into the economy.

A specific kind of policy course correction, then, is needed to motivate significant private investment in new industry, new technologies, and new jobs. It has to be the kind of policy that will not cost taxpayers a lot of money, that gets money from industry profits moving through the consumer economy, and which either before or after achieving that, results in the net creation of millions of new jobs.

There are few ways to achieve this, but there is real promise in the energy sector. Because energy is tied into all other economic activity, which means that virtuous adjustments to how we find energy, how we harvest it, and how we get it to consumers, will ultimately push a cascade of positive impacts through the economy.

According to the Carbon War Room:

Investing $1.3 trillion each year in green sectors would deliver long-term stability in the global economy, a new UN report has suggested. Spending about 2 percent of global GDP in 10 key areas would kick-start a global low carbon, resource efficient green economy.

Since the oil crises of the 1970s, billions of dollars have been pumped into technology development in the areas of energy efficiency, low carbon energy, efficient transportation, bio-fuels, and other areas. This investment has led to hundreds of breakthroughs that are today cost effective. Yet, full commercial utilization of these innovations and their financial rewards still elude us.

What is needed to deploy those breakthrough innovations is for private capital to come off the sidelines and motivate collateral investment in an overhaul of our outmoded energy sector. Clean, renewable energy sources will replace dirty, finite combustible fuels; the question is whether it happens sooner, bringing the economic benefits to more people at a lower overall investment cost, or later, putting off the moment of maximum opportunity.

In many ways, the legacy of the Bush years will be one of putting off the moment of maximum generalized economic opportunity. Much was done to slow the development of rivals to the fossil fuels sector, and unprecedented amounts of money were spent to protect, obtain and propagate the use of fossil fuels. Even the catastrophic deepwater BP oil well failure of 2010, with net cost impact estimates running as high as $100 billion, was the result of a culture of lax regulation and virtually non-existent safety and emergency planning, instituted by the Bush-era Interior Department.

That the signs of impending economic calamity were visible for at least four to five years before the financial collapse of 2008 is an indication of how urgently policy makers need to learn the lesson that all citizens are stakeholders in the outcome of our broader economic policy and that the work of government is to protect stakeholder interest, not shareholder interest.

A confusion of the two may be the leading philosophical driver of the 2008 collapse, as shareholder interest was thought to be inherently virtuous for wider economic prosperity. But in the hyperactive financial markets of 2001-2008, shareholder interest was too often served by practices that ran contrary to the wider interests of sustainable economic growth and generalized prosperity.

If we are to emerge from the Great Recession and its aftermath stronger and more resilient than we were when it set in, then we need to favor government policies that actively consider the stakeholder interests of citizens and incentivize private investment to work for the wider economy. The capture-and-hold profit-making of the Bush years was in many ways illusory and corrosive to long-term economic health; we need real investment, with resilient, optimizing impacts on the consumer economy, so that more people are earning, more people are spending, and more people are building assets and buying power to keep us secure against another collapse.

Recommendations: 

• To Solve the Debt Crisis, Rebuild the Middle Class
• Why We Should Have a National Infrastructure Bank
• Fee and Dividend: To Spur Job Creation, Industrial Boom

Perry touts Texas jobs record, promises to make government “inconsequential”

Today, three-term Texas governor Rick Perry announced his bid for the Republican presidential nomination, promising to foster innovation and enterprise. The speech offered no specifics, but Perry called for simplifying the tax code and promoting private business interests. In what may be the most striking and unusual phrasing of the speech, Perry promised, with passion: “I’ll work every day to make Washington, DC, as inconsequential in your lives as I can.”

Perry offered no plan for balancing the widening federal budget deficits, calling instead for what appeared to be a new round of tax cuts for business and decrying the American government as an institution that “takes too much” from its people. While short on specifics, Perry’s speech was a startling departure from what many believe to be the economic reality of the times: taxes are at historically low rates, revenues are so low, economists fear budget shortfalls are stunting economic growth, and Perry, who has left Texas with a $27 billion budget deficit is calling for cuts and for a radical rolling back of government.

The speech was in many ways like the speeches given by George W. Bush during the 2000 campaign, referring wistfully to the ideology of Margaret Thatcher, decrying the American government as intrusive and corrosive of free enterprise, and promising tax cuts that could lead to serious long-term stagnation for average household wages and the wider consumer economy. Perry attacked Pres. Obama, suggesting that his economic agenda—which has favored entrepreneurship, small business and innovation—is somehow the opposite of what it has been.

And in what appears to be a foreshadowing of Perry’s coming campaign of free-market rhetoric, Perry vowed to repeal Pres. Obama’s “one-size-fits-all government healthcare plan”—which, incidentally, does not exist and was never part of the Affordable Care Act. Perry’s rhetoric is tough, aggressive and ideologically deep-seated, but he will have to be far more disciplined about facts and solutions. Beyond that, he will have to grapple with the realities of both the healthcare law—already paying dividends in lower cost growth and popular among many who have benefited—and the budget—where he will not have the liberty to run up massive deficit spending to pay for new tax cuts.

Perry’s record in Texas is decidedly mixed: while he and his supporters have talked up the so-called “Texas miracle”, the miracle is in many ways an illusion. While there have been more new jobs created in Texas than in other states, unemployment remains high, wages have declined, most of the new jobs are very low paying, and immigration, including illegal immigration, which Perry has opposed, is considered to be the main source of growth in the Texas economy.

On energy, Perry’s record also must be of interest to voters: while Texas has more developed energy infrastructure than any other state, it is presently in its fifth “energy emergency” of 2011, and has had to resort to importing electricity from Mexico. This is in part because, while talking up his interest in renewables, and benefitting from a ground-up boom in wind energy production in his state, Perry has helped to impede the building of new clean energy infrastructure, favoring huge subsidies for fossil fuels production, making his state more vulnerable to foreign oil powers, price fluctuations, cartels and high fuel costs.

According to TIME Magazine’s Swampland blog:

In a report written for Perry last spring, Porter found that Texas’ overall prosperity growth, as measured by the rate of change in per capita GDP, was the eighth slowest in the country from 1998 to 2008. Texas has the highest proportion of minimum-wage jobs and the lowest median wage in the country. Porter found that Texas’ labor-force productivity was growing more slowly than 37 other states, further suggesting that the job-creation machine may not be keeping pace with productivity improvements in the rest of the country.

Perry offered no plan for taxes, war, healthcare, education, debt and deficit reduction, or economic recovery. In fact, his speech sounded much like it was intended to convey the message that he would call for aggressive austerity measures of the type that pushed the UK into a recession, after the were pushed through by David Cameron’s government.

In Texas, Perry has developed a reputation for being tough politically, but never truly popular with the legislature or with the people. He has won three consecutive terms, which many attribute to a kind of aggressive and hyperbolic rhetoric that is designed to obscure the realities of the public policy landscape, where his performance has not been as winning as he would like voters to believe.

His chief political adviser says Perry’s jobs record will make him the strongest possible Republican candidate to take on Obama, especially in a slow recovery with sparse job creation. But there are concerns about whether Perry’s record really stands up to scrutiny and whether once some of his more extreme positions become known, he might not appeal to moderates and to swing-state independent voters needed to win the presidency.

According to Politico:

One veteran GOP strategist said that multiple members of Congress had “expressed concerns about Perry’s ability to compete in not only the traditional 10 to 12 swing states, but also some of the lean-Republican states.”

The same state party chair, who spoke on condition of anonymity, voiced a worry that Perry hasn’t been “thoroughly vetted” and predicted: “If he’s the nominee, the first thing the White House is going to do is make an issue of secession.”

Perry’s 2009 comment — he said he didn’t want to “dissolve” the Union, “but if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that?” — is already the most famous black mark on his political resume.

Republican operatives have reportedly expressed worry that he is a “bombastic regional politician” who is not equipped to appeal to the governing priorities the majority of the country want to see. They worry that his extremist rhetoric, threatening secession if he were to disagree with Washington policy, calling for war against Mexico, will persuade most voters that Perry might be dangerous distracted by ideology and by personal obsessions, and not focused on serving all of the people.

Perry’s campaign announcement speech did little to calm those worries, and in fact may have exacerbated them. There is analysis that suggests Perry’s early moves will determine primarily whether the “smart money” starts to flow in decisive amounts to frontrunner and reputed moderate Mitt Romney, or whether a competitive Perry will dilute funding and support among a wider number of candidates, undermining the party’s chances to defeat Obama—the most prolific fundraiser in US history.

Perry’s “rogue” status may also work against him. While some believe a tough, “truth-talking” cowboy image will appeal to voters who are tired of the nuance and maneuvering of so many Congressional factions, others say Sarah Palin’s struggle to draw interest for her film or for a potential candidacy is a general fatigue with the very idea of a “rogue” candidate.

After a great deal of media hype, during several weeks, Gov. Perry announced his candidacy from South Carolina, on the day of the Republican Straw Poll, in Ames, Iowa, and Perry supporters can write in his name in Ames, if they support him. If he fails to show in the top half of the list of candidates, at the very least, there will be questions about his appeal to voters outside of Texas and the south.

Unlike Huntsman and Romney, who have set themselves up as problem-solvers, Perry seems to be betting his campaign on Bush-era Republican ideology and his record in Texas. The Obama campaign is almost certain to set itself up not as the “big government” campaign, but as the “good government” campaign. Perry’s attacks on the very idea of government playing a constructive role in the economic landscape may unnerve voters in the vital center of the ideological spectrum.

TheHotSpring.net :: The debt crisis is attributable to “structural” causes, meaning the way the nation’s financing is structured over the next several decades, but also to political and economic causes, meaning both the way we make policy and the way we live and experience the marketplace for trade, credit and consumer purchases. So, we need to implement policies that make serious, sustainable corrections on all three fronts.

On Monday, the first day of trading after a credit downgrade of US Treasury bonds from Standard and Poors, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 624 points. On Tuesday, it gained 429 points. On Wednesday, it dropped by 509. And on Thursday, it gained 414. It is the first time in its history that the DJIA saw swings of 400 points or more for four consecutive days, swings that far out-strip some of the worst one-day declines in its history.

But perhaps most importantly, Thursday, August 11, 2011, marked the eighth consecutive trading session in which the DJIA changed the direction of its net increase or decrease. The volatility is literally unprecedented, and analysts have been at a loss to explain why. Some say US employment numbers drove the market down, others that they are what pulled the market back up. Some say European banks are “scaring” investors, others that American banks may be less solvent than previously known.

According to Dow Jones, as of Aug 11, 2011:

• The DJIA has changed directions each day for the past eight sessions.
• This is the first time in its history, the DJIA has closed with a net change of 400 points or greater for four consecutive days.
• This is the fourth straight day of 3.5% + moves; the last time this occurred was the four-day period ended November 24, 2008.
• Second largest point and percent gain this year.
• An intraday high of 11278.90 occurred at 15:46:44 today, representing an increase of 558.96 points, or 5.21%.
• An intraday low of 10729.85 occurred at the open today.
• The DJIA has now had six consecutive days of 400+ point high/low swings (549.05 points today) — The last time this occurred was during the six-day period ended 10/29/2008.
• Down 3021.22 points, or 21.33% from its record close of 14164.53 on October 9, 2007.
• Up 7.98% from 52 weeks ago.
• Up 70.20% from its 12-year closing low of 6547.05 on March 9, 2009.

What may astonish many of the uninitiated is that in just one day, on August 11, “The market capitalization of the DJIA rose $140.8B today.” That means the 30 corporations that comprise the Dow Jones Industrial Average appreciated in value by a total of $140.8 billion, in just a few hours.

What’s more, “All 30 component stocks closed up today; the last session where all 30 stocks traded higher was 08/09/2011.” So, in the midst of this “summer of uncertainty”, every “blue-chip” stock on the DJIA gained in value for two out of the four most volatile trading days in history.

Some have said the reason for the declines was that American businesses are not as competitive; others say Apple’s new position as the nation’s most valuable corporation has buoyed stocks in general, showing that innovation and consumer products can restore economic growth. Some say markets are worried about government policy; others say it is the Fed’s unprecedented decision to set interest rates as near zero for at least two years that has allowed a rebound to occur.

Nevertheless, over the eight sessions in which the DJIA has swung back and forth each day, the overall decline has been 986 points or 8.1%. Since July 22, when concerns that the US would default on its debt actually became credible, as Republicans walked out of talks, the decline has been 1,581 points, or 12.4%.

Why is that important? It is important, because it actually gives us a real and relevant marker of enough significance to explain why the market has seen some of the most intense volatility it has ever seen. It began to become clear, on the 22nd of July, that Republicans in the US House of Representatives were not willing to make a “grand bargain” to reduce the American budget deficit by $4 trillion over 10 years, because they had vowed not to raise taxes.

Markets responded by declining steadily. In fact, between July 22 and August 3, the DJIA declined steadily every single day, as the US debt crisis came to a head. Then, on August 4, began the daily reversals that have puzzled so many investors, analysts and policy makers. And there is good reason for this period of intense confusion: US Treasury bonds, the value of which was called into question by the debt-ceiling crisis, underpin the entire global financial system.

August 2011 has posed grave and unanswerable questions to the worldwide financial sector: What would happen if the US defaulted on its debt? What would happen if the most stable financial investment in the world suddenly saw its credit rating downgraded? More confusing still: what if only one agency downgraded it, while the rest disagreed with what are patently unsound calculations by that one agency?

What will happen to the American economy if Texas experiences its fifth energy emergency of the year, while Dallas endures 40 consecutive days of 100ºF heat and the state begins importing electricity from Mexico? What if austerity measures—deep cuts in government spending—in Europe and the US begin to impede economic growth and destabilize major consumer economies?

This period of intense volatility is attributable to a lot of economic challenges, but mainly to the unprecedented confusion over whether the US government will work across party lines to support its long-term debt obligations. That policy logjam has very savvy investors, some of the world’s best, confused as to how best to judge the long-term value of not just US Treasury bonds, but thousands of different kinds of investments.

The relentless inflexibility of anti-tax radicals in the House of Representatives has destabilized the world financial system, in that it has injected irrationality into the management of the most rational, stable, form of financial investment and called into question. The world’s major industrial economies are facing unprecedented coordinated pressures, with food prices and cost of living rising in China, and Europe and the US experiencing massive employment crises and declining overall wages.

While Pres. Obama’s economic stewardship has coincided with the DJIA having gained “70.20% from its 12-year closing low of 6547.05 on March 9, 2009″, he has not had a cooperative opposition, and the steady—if gradual—recovery is seen as being in doubt by many investors. Yet Warren Buffett, thought by many to be the world’s most successful, steady and reliable investor, has said the entire debate is off the mark, that he would give US Treasury bonds a AAAA rating, if one existed.

So, four days of radical stock market swings—eight days of unprecedented back-and-forthing—show… very little with clarity. More than half of all trades are now computerized, following pattern-based programs for investment, which means the markets are not necessarily “commenting” on economic reality, so much as they are being driven by machines trying to maximize returns, given the moment to moment activity of other traders.

Whatever the underlying dynamic, it will surely play out as ripple effects of uncertainty that have very certain impacts, jogging or slowing credit markets and undermining the ability of home-buyers to fund new purchases or new construction. Indeed, in what may be a story of massive overriding significance, 60 Minutes this week began to report on what may yet be the most important economic trend of the year: how banks’ insistence on foreclosure as a tool for optimizing their home-loan ROI might be dragging the housing sector down.

TheHotSpring.net :: With the objectivity and commitment to fact of S&P now seriously in question, and allegations now revived that it and other rating agencies were paid to give AAA ratings to junk securities derivatives, it is clear that we need a 100% not-for-profit (NFP) cooperative bond rating agency. The independent NFP agency could be one of several, staffed by top economists, stakeholders and public servants, and standing somewhere between the public and the private sectors.

The role of such a new cooperative agency would be to take the profit motive and the complication of day to day financial dealings out of the rating agency portfolio. While Standard and Poors is owned by the publishing conglomerate McGraw Hill, its analysts have been accused of incestuous relationships with the entities they are tasked with rating, sometimes taking huge profits in financial services fees while evaluating risky products put out by their patrons.

A not-for-profit rating agency would allow for greater transparency, a more aggressive process of analysis, and more unbiased foundation for that analysis. It would allow for a wider-ranging and more flexible input of data to ensure that evaluations correspond in some clear way to genuine long-term value. It would, in short, ensure that private interests don’t interfere with the straightforward process of factual analysis.

It would also, maybe more than any other single factor, help to contribute to a virtuous cycle of transitioning back toward separation of interests, diversification of markets, and decentralization of financial sector influence and wealth creation. How would this benefit society at large? It would allow for a more democratic, more evidentiary, more pragmatic reading of bonds and other financial services products.

The first step is to remove the profit motive from the evaluation process. The reason for this is that the assumption that narrow profit motives somehow spark virtuous behavior, “efficiency” and “performance” loses relevance when the incentive to produce a given rating—like AAA on high-risk subprime mortgage-backed derivatives—conflicts with the evidence-based analysis, which indicates that there is no way that product can be a safe bet for most investors.

- – - A brief aside: The same can be true in reverse: a bond rating agency that made such catastrophically bad misjudgments when there was a conflicting interest in play could seek to be more aggressive, in a highly visible way, to restore its reputation for seriousness of purpose, when—by coincidence—there is no direct accounts receivable windfall in play.

There is enough room for doubt that on the first day of trading since S&P’s downgrade of US Treasury bonds, those same bonds have hit an all-time record for demand, as investors seek shelter in the very product that was just downgraded. That suggests the S&P evaluation was flawed, or was issued for mathematically inconsistent reasons, or simply that—as one analyst suggested today—their poor performance during the mortgage bubble has left them less relevant and less well regarded generally. 

Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist, wrote today that “they may be a prestigious organization for some reason, but their track record is ludicrously bad.” In fact, he is not the only prominent economist expressing concern that the Wall Street firms and the financial services sector more broadly are becoming perilously divorced from the wider economy. – - -

The American economic system has artfully grappled for generations with the problematic tension between narrow, well-funded interests, and the wider landscape of stakeholder interests. A strong regulatory system and vibrant democratic marketplace have been able, periodically, to rein in abusive behavior and make it visibly profitable for powerful interests driving economic behavior to line up their interests with those of the wider economy.

Some now believe that time may have passed. A generation’s worth of deregulation and financial experimentation have led to the widest wealth gap since before the Great Depression, and credible economic analysis suggests the stagnant economic trendlines are the result of having a post-Depression system, with meaningful checks and balances, and a Depression-era economic dynamism. In other words, we should be experiencing a depression, but we have deployed failsafe measures to make it less likely.

The stakeholder problem is a very real bone of economic contention, and very much worthy of close scrutiny. Where financial instruments are based on bad investments, then pitched as good investments, and tens of trillions of dollars in private wealth evaporate, even the most minute activities within the financial services sector have high-stakes consequences for people and institutions throughout the economy.

A genuinely useful, wholly relevant and economically optimally constructive rating system requires real independence. It requires a commitment to fact, and a commitment to economic balance and generalized prosperity. It requires a substantive, transparent measure of the major economic drivers that induce periods of “irrational exuberance” for bad investments, which by extension bring widespread economic hardship in their wake, when banks shut down many of their financial support services to the middle class and small businesses.

The proposed NFP cooperative bond rating agency would be:

• fully independent of ties to Wall Street firms;
• required to publish source material and white-paper reports detailing internal discussions;
• required to publish information regarding all meetings with any interested parties;
• focused on stakeholder interests across the economy;
• responsible for public comment fora, at least one per month, to gather anecdotal guidance;
• staffed with independent economists, former financial services professionals, public service veterans—each without active ties to interested parties;
• required to pay only base stipends, with no bonuses except for consistent accuracy over the long term;
• a model for similar NFP financial analysis projects.

The four central ideas motivating this new model, and which should then be emulated by competing institutions are:

1. eliminating professional conflict of interest;
2. comprehensive transparency of process, sourcing and aims;
3. focus on overall stakeholder interest;
4. reliable precision, based on health modeling, not profit forecasting.

The simplest way to institute a project on this scale, with this level of responsibility and in a visible enough way to give it active influence and long-term viability is, of course, a public-private partnership. It should be funded in part by the federal government, and in part by the financial services sector, and top schools of economics should hold competitions to bring on board some of the world’s most visionary, flexible and precise economic minds.

The process should begin this fall and winter, with the goal of holding public hearings for the creation of the first independent NFP cooperative rating agency in the spring and fall of 2012. The fully functional institution could be active by the end of 2012, in time to play a constructive role in the landscape of analysis surrounding the 2013 negotiations on the 2014 federal budget, and the financial planning of major banks, insurers, governments and industry.

In order to win support from radical Tea Party freshmen, most of whom voted against the legislation anyway, Congressional leaders imposed stiff new tax penalties on radiate students across the country. Specifically, subsidized loans for grad students were cut—the government provides all student loans, so this effectively eliminates funding for post-graduate education—and a tax credit for borrowers who repay student loans on time for 12 consecutive months was eliminated.

The tax credit eliminated costs far less than the massive subsidies going to oil, natural gas, coal and nuclear power companies, yet the Tea Party freshmen, who have touted their opposition to any and every tax increase, did nothing to oppose the tax hikes on students. And while the tax credits may be much smaller than fossil fuel subsidies, or nuclear, eliminating them will cost far more.

Eliminating the on-time repayment credit will reduce the likelihood of on-time repayment significantly, potentially costing the government billions, over time, as well as subjecting more borrowers to fines and fees, depleting their personal economic footprint, and serving as a drag on growth.

The logic is simply astonishing: while the radical anti-tax Tea Partiers, backed by billionaire partisans, claim as an article of faith the absolute truth that any and all tax cuts incentivize the wealthy to create jobs—though we have ten years of evidence this is often not the case—, they reject the idea that a direct cash incentive for repayment will pay off—despite the evidence that it does.

In fact, the particular kind of tax increase the Tea Partiers have demanded and are supporting is more costly and will exacerbate not only budget shortfalls but also the negative economic trends whereby the American people are unnecessarily disadvantaged in the face of far more powerful economic forces.

Allegations that the so-called Tea Party caucus has degenerated into little more than a lobby for the wealthy interests that back them gain credibility when they support tax hikes on the vulnerable, and which will have a direct negative impact on the middle class. It should be well understood by all: the House Tea Party Republicans have pushed for and supported—the anti-student provisions in the failed Republican-only House bills were far worse—tax hikes that will make college more expensive and eat way at middle class wealth.

The Republican House leadership today again reiterated the false claim that Democratic leaders and the president have been pushing for “job-killing tax increases”. It is obviously a deliberate rhetorical exaggeration, designed to make a case for tax cuts, in a mode of campaigning and fundraising. But it is also a lie: not one politician in either party has ever called for “job-killing tax increases”.

But there is substantial evidence that radical revenue shortfalls, owing to the unfunded Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 are responsible for the lag in job-creation. The recipients of those cuts are not “job creators” if they are not creating jobs. They were creating jobs before those tax cuts, and wages were higher. Overall economic growth was bigger and the economy itself was growing at a sustainable pace.

The Bush tax cuts interrupted a trend of spreading middle-class affluence. More people were entering the middle class, and more people in the middle class were building broad bases of financial and property assets. While some Republicans continue to push campaign distortions with no foundation in reality as the sole argument about the American economy, the facts paint a very different picture:

In fact, it appears that the unfunded, unaffordable Bush tax cuts have had a corrosive impact on government revenues, a corrosive impact on job creation, and a corrosive impact on the job-creation potential of private wealth holdings. The Bush tax cuts have been intensely regressive—funneling far more money to the wealthy, and depriving most other Americans of comparable wealth gains.

Now that Republicans and Democrats both are griping about the unsavory taste of the bipartisan debt compromise, there is a return to false claims about Pres. Obama—the only president in US history to repeatedly demand that Congress “find the funds” and send him “deficit neutral” bills—wanting “a blank check” and about the Democratic party being devoted to a perverse conspiracy to “kill jobs”, and erode the middle class.

The arithmetic is simple: it is the policies of Pres. Barack Obama that have been designed precisely to benefit the middle class and hardworking wage earners; it is the policies of the House Republican caucus that have been designed to cut spending, cut taxes and steer still more of the American people’s household wealth to the already wealthy.

It is Pres. Obama who has been pushing policies designed to ensure that the United States fulfills its obligations; it is the Republican House caucus that has been pushing the idea that “we overpromised” to those under 55, and that Medicare is fundamentally unaffordable and should be reformed into nonexistence—Medicare is an insurance plan; the Ryan plan proposes replacing it with a coupon book but requiring seniors to buy costly private health insurance.

One of the worst and most insidious tricks of the Bush administration’s fiscal and economic policies is hard at work in the current radicalism of the Republican House caucus, and that is the giving of special favors—in the form of unfunded tax credits, lower rates and wide-open loopholes, to make businesses that have ceased to serve the market look as if they still do.

Specifically, instead of requiring—as did the Affordable Care Act—that insurers meet new standards, turn no one away and provide quality care at affordable rates, in exchange for tens of millions of new private sector clients, the Ryan Medicare plan would simply force tens of millions of seniors to give huge sums to the insurance industry, without demanding performance. In other words, it would take seniors’ money without requiring even similar quality of care to what Medicare now makes possible.

It is the job-killing unfunded tax cuts and wealth displacement of the Bush era that Democratic leaders and Pres. Obama are working to overturn, so that the nation can be restored to fiscal sanity and the interests that control most of the nation’s wealth can return to job creation. It is simple common sense: free money already received does not provide an incentives; the need to be enterprising in order to earn new wealth, does.

The Tea Party movement was a grassroots rebellion of discontented, disenfranchised, fiscally conservative working people. It was wage earners and small-town conservatives who wanted reason and rationality in government. It ballooned into a pro-Republican juggernaut, financed by billionaire partisans, and managed to maneuver itself into a position of seemingly dictatorial control over the Republican majority in the House of Representatives.

Tea Party luminaries have professed adoration for many details of the radical reform budget put forward by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), but Republican party campaign coordinators continue to believe the self-professed Tea Party caucus leader Michelle Bachmann would not be viable as the party’s nominee for president. There are tensions, to be sure, but the chattering class in Washington seems to have missed a vitally important detail of the story:

The debt ceiling crisis has essentially sealed the demise of the true Tea Party movement within the Republican party, for one very simple reason. The Republican Tea Party radicals have demanded, above all other priorities, the absolute commitment to protecting tax breaks for the wealthiest of the wealthy, even where it would bring on default, force interest rates to soar, and put the nation in a still deeper fiscal mess.

The Tea Party cannot be a grassroots movement, emerging from no particular center of influence, spontaneously rising up to protest against unfair government tax policy, if it is co-opted wholesale by billionaire interests and committed entirely to protecting, maintaining and expanding, unfair government tax policy. This is not to say that most Tea Party backers are aware at how far from their demands the Tea Party caucus has veered; many may be confused about whether the radical pro-wealth tax policy of the current caucus will or will not benefit them.

But let’s look at a few key facts:

• The Bush tax cuts for the wealthy are costing trillions of dollars in added national debt;
• That debt is expected to be paid by all Americans, as the tax cuts for the wealthy are designed to reduce the burden on the wealthy, transferring it to the rest of the population;
• Added debt will drive the nation to default or a credit downgrade, if new revenues are not found;
• The Tea Party radicals in the House of Representatives have committed not to deficit or debt reduction, but to protecting tax breaks for the wealthy;
• The Tea Party radicals in the House of Representatives continue to push against a solution to raise the debt ceiling;
• Failure to raise the debt ceiling will impose massive across-the-board cost increases on most Americans, slowing economic growth, choking off capital to small businesses, accelerating joblessness, pricing many people out of their homes;
• Committed defense of unaffordably expensive tax credits to the ultrawealthy undermines the economic standing of the middle class and wage earners;

The Tea Party has been effectively eliminated by the billionaire-backed Club for Growth, and its quest to overrule American democracy and institute tax policies designed to deliver massive new unearned income to the ultra wealthy and to multinational corporations. The contradiction here cannot be overstated or overlooked.

Either the Tea Party is against unfair government tax policy that disadvantages most Americans, or it is not. At present, the real voice of the Tea Party in the Republican conference, in the House of Representatives has all but been erased by the interests that favor the permanent extension of the Bush tax cuts and a host of other regressive tax policies designed to establish funding streams that run from small businesses, families and working people, to the accounts of billionaires and multinationals.

Even as Democratic leaders secretly cheer what they view as the future electoral inviability of the radical Republican “hostage-takers” in the House of Representatives, the media and the political analysis of Washington, DC, seem to be missing the real ideological and strategic import of the moment: what is being touted as the apotheosis of the Tea Party is in many ways its demise.

Day after day, throughout the debt crisis, it has been possible to read or to witness interviews with Tea Party grassroots leaders and intellectual leaders, who insist that the movement is not about defending tax cuts for the rich. Yet their protests are falling on deaf ears, as the establishment in Washington continues to interpret the opposition to unfair tax policy as support for policies disadvantageous to most Americans, and observers conflate the Tea Party’s populism with the GOP’s committed defense of the theories of Milton Friedman.

Perhaps making the anomalous state of affairs in the House still more clear: facing the possibility of more than $4 trillion in long-term debt and deficit reduction, in a plan balanced between new cuts and new revenue, making it more viable, more sustainable, and more conducive to long-term fiscal health, Speaker of the House John Boehner rejected the plan, in favor of a much weaker plan that would do very little to solve the debt crisis and would likely saddle most Tea Party supporters with higher costs.

It now looks like the Tea Party’s goals for this Congress are unobtainable, as neither the Republican leadership nor the so-called Tea Party caucus support any follow through on policies that would make the tax code more fair. Indeed, at the present moment, the sole voice calling for comprehensive tax-code reform, to eliminate distortionary loopholes and special deals, is Pres. Obama, whom the Tea Party do not recognize as an ally.

So, what of the Tea Party’s great promise of pervasive influence? It always had to do with only one element of the Tea Party dynamic—the claim to represent the interests of ordinary Americans who work for a living and want common sense fiscal policy. The Tea Party caucus in the House has abandoned policies that would serve that base, to win the favor of big money backers.

A failure to do bigger, more sustainable debt and deficit reduction, to defend tax cuts for the wealthy and demand that cuts be paid for by seniors, students and the middle class, signals the demise of the Tea Party movement in this Congress.

Speaker of the House John Boehner has insisted on enforcing a strategy whereby his party dictates all federal budget policy, no matter the law, no matter the makeup of Congress, no matter the risks to the future of the United States of America. Now, after a wasted week of partisan isolationism and refusal to negotiate, he has passed a radical one-sided plan that will hurt most Americans, while doing little to solve the debt crisis or stave off a credit downgrade.

After the Bolshevik revolution swept away centuries of Russian imperial history, Vladimir Lenin’s regime adopted an attitude of benign demolition—the view that destruction was itself a creative force, allowing for positive change that could not otherwise happen. In today’s American political scene, a constitutional scholar, a moderate and a vocational negotiator now finds himself in pitched battle with a Republican House caucus that has adopted Lenin’s reckless approach to governing.

The new Tea Party freshmen in Congress have imposed on their party, on their speaker, on the American people, a politics of allegedly benign demolition. Claiming to be patriots who love austerity, they demand we burn the village—impoverish millions of Americans and slow down the economy for a generation—in order to save it. The argument seems to be that American democracy is wrong, negotiation is wrong, bipartisanship is wrong, and that the more severely the process of governing is obstructed, the better.

It is vitally important to note two key aspects of the bill that passed the House of Representatives on Friday:

1. It contained no constructive vision whatsoever for how to upgrade and sustain vital programs like Medicare and Social Security—only cuts;
2. It did not in fact meet the structural reform demands of most Republicans, but included steep cuts to programs that benefit citizens every day, including at least 39 different radical reversals to environmental protections…

In order to “motivate” the rogue element in the Republican caucus, Speaker of the House John Boehner played a clip from the Ben Affleck movie ‘The Town’, in which Affleck’s character says to a friend, in a somewhat desperate and ominous way: ”I need your help. I can’t tell you what it is. You can never ask me about it later. And we’re gonna hurt some people.”

The use of the clip was widely criticized as bizarre and reckless. The clip clearly suggested there could be value in doing harm to people. The use of the clip as a motivational tool clearly suggested there was a consensus view that hurting people could be a pleasurable bonding experience and a way to feel energized. In short, it seemed to many a shameless revelation of the leadership’s view that the radical first-years could only be brought on board with the promise that someone would be harmed.

Critics denounced the stunt as sadistic and out of bounds, a stain on the Congress. But the motif itself reflects a wider political strategy, by which deliberately harming and hampering the ability of the federal government to operate efficiently is seen as a constructive and patriotic act.

After three decades of one of the two parties committing its entire fiscal policy to the relentless and mounting reduction of taxes, revenues are now at an historic low, just over 14% of GDP—and that is with slow growth—budget policy has become about deprivation. Even in the face of extreme revenue shortfalls, at a time of grudging economic growth and facing a national default, the radicals who favor benign demolition remain convinced they are behaving in the interests of the same entity—the nation—they seek to save.

Under the pressure of pervasive consequence, however, the passion for forced austerity—coupled with a doctrine of oppose, obstruct and eliminate, at all costs—quickly degrades into uncontrolled heat and light, blinding those who argue that setting the building on fire will save it from collapse. In other words, the Republican House caucus has adopted Lenin’s reckless attitude of benign demolition, in which harming innocents is applauded as progress.

This is not news, at least not entirely. Mitch McConnell, who yesterday told Harry Reid on the floor of the Senate that he would not negotiate in any way with him, openly declared that he would dedicate his leadership of the Senate majority to the destruction of Barack Obama’s presidency. Since he made that declaration, it has become increasingly difficult to discern any substantive effort on his part to play a constructive role in economic stewardship.

It may seem extreme to suggest that the Republican party has committed itself to sabotaging the American economy in order to “destroy the Obama presidency” , but when there is little evidence to the contrary, the question has to be raised. And what is so dangerous, given that dynamic, is the train of thought that demands a brutal, painful rearrangement of priorities, and which favors the onset of calamity to make the pain seem like a sensible choice.

It is not in the tradition of American conservatism that the system should be driven to calamity in order to achieve narrow ideological goals that are harmful to the majority of people in material ways. It is not in the tradition of American democracy for one party to put the nation itself in jeopardy in order to get an edge over its opponents.

The House Republican caucus has an absolute moral obligation to abandon this slide into Leninist demolition tactics, and to propose constructive solutions that edify every vital program and protection the American people expect and deserve. Hurting people is not democracy; it is the absence of moral consideration.

Democracy requires service to, not sidelining of the people’s interest. The demolition of a century’s worth of progress toward fairness and personal security in the American economy is a departure from the ethical demands of legitimate government, and the people should be expected to judge such behavior harshly, at their next opportunity to express their will through the vote.

If the leadership of the House of Representatives does not craft a bill that can work as a bipartisan compromise that will pass both houses, and be signed into law, they will be knowingly imposing on the entire American economy a steep “tax”, in the form of rapidly escalating interest rates. Those interest rate increases will impose a real and measurable cost inflation on all interactions with the economy.

Once the nation’s credit rating is downgraded, Treasury bond interest rates will have to go up, and those interest rates will push all other interest rates higher, choking off credit to consumers, families and businesses. And the negative impact will multiply, by very simple logic: will for-profit entities—i.e. banks—who make their profit from interest not only increase interest rates, but increase them enough to pad their profits, if basis rates go up?

The Republican party’s tempting of markets to react to imminent default is not only a “dangerous game”; it is a reckless experiment in the deliberate, long-term degradation of the American economy. It will pose an “across the board” threat to American enterprise, and literally undermine—take the legs out from under—the still slow and tenuous recovery. It will also make permanent some of the driving dynamics of the slow jobs economy.

How? By building into our economic fabric a degraded credit rating, the Boehner-Cantor default will make all government borrowing, indeed all borrowing of any kind, more expensive. This cost increase will not be temporary, as it will propagate the fiscal dysfunction currently at work in the budget process to the entire economy, forcing every man, woman and child in the United States to fund unnecessarily high interest payments.

The burden Republican radicals say they want to put a stop to—the ever-increasing share of the federal budget going to interest payments—will be expanded to all American businesses, households and individuals. Banks will find it harder to make money, as fewer and fewer people are able to meet the threshold for borrowing, and so will push for still higher ROI on ever riskier, and/or less frequent lending.

Republican leaders might object to calling their singularly engineered default, and resulting interest rate hikes, as a tax, but in the sense of imposing a heavy added cost burden on the American people—not to mention the Republican rhetorical flourish wherein everything other than free cash for business is a tax hike—it is.

The cost of living will go up, even as employment opportunity narrows, and wages continue to fall, when adjusting for inflation. Credit will become more scarce, threatening to halt an extremely feeble housing recovery, and to put still more home buyers “underwater”. States will see more pressure to lower property taxes, to mark to market, even as banks fight to avoid the same fate.

There will be more layoffs at the federal and state level, and vital incentives for businesses will begin to dry up, as federal and state budget hawks take note of how difficult it is to finance such incentives through new borrowing. Today, the IMF chief warned that a US credit downgrade could do severe harm to the entire global economy—blocking yet another source of potential income for American businesses and investors.

While anti-tax radicals in the GOP are convinced that a default will be the jolt to the system they need to remake American fiscal policy in a way that spurs economic growth, it will in fact be the single most effective way to insure the contagion of fiscal dysfunction and escalating long-term economic burden to entities large and small that—unlike the US government—cannot afford to bear that burden for even a little while.

The Boehner-Cantor default tax will, in fairness, also be in large part attributable to Rep. Paul Ryan’s radical budget proposal, which itself was rooted in a number of fiscal policy fantasies, chief among them that cutting spending automatically creates jobs, spurs growth and increases revenues, even if tax rates are slashed at the outset.

Ryan’s plan took all of the wrong lessons from the fiscal policy of the Reagan years, amounting to—according to some critics—an irrationally rosy rewriting of history, in the hopes that money and economics will just be different in this next go-round. More specifically: Ryan confused tax cutting with economic growth. He made the assumption that a government small enough so as to be unable to aid in fostering economic health and wellbeing would somehow do so magically.

He forgot to take note of the many tax increases Reagan was forced to sign, in order to make sure the nation did not fall into depression and loses its competitive edge against the Soviet Union, as a result of his radical tax cuts. He forgot to take note of how necessary Reagan made “deficit spending” to the shape and function of our national government and our economy more broadly.

Ryan proposed, essentially, a more radical version of Reagan’s failed policy, ignoring the fact that his plan would ultimately drive the government into far more long-term borrowing, or necessitate a dramatic decline in GDP and key areas of medium to long-term investment. So, it could be a Boehner-Cantor-Ryan tax, but it is Boehner and Cantor who made Mr. Ryan’s radicalism seem mainstream, sparking a misguided intransigence among their own caucus.

The default, if it comes, will be owned by Messrs. Boehner and Cantor, who have, between them, walked out of talks at least three times, simply because they refused to even listen to alternative ideas. And they did so in service of a radical minority of one party, who have already vowed not to assist in avoiding economic chaos.

Polling now shows clearly that while Pres. Obama suffers from an economic approval rating below 50%, that number might be more about incentivizing action than about policy preferences. Recent polls also show a majority of the American people have more faith in Mr. Obama than in either party’s Congressional leadership, to deal with debt and deficits.

Polling also reveals that while nearly 60% of the public believe George W. Bush’s economic policies inflicted lasting harm on the economy, only 37% believe Barack Obama’s policies have caused harm. The suggestion is that the public is more aware of who is offering viable solutions, and who is acting in good faith, than partisan dividing lines would ordinarily allow.

Meanwhile, the new Republican majority has succeeded in driving anti-incumbency sentiment to its highest rate on record, after just six months in control of the House of Representatives. They have lost two important House elections this year already, as the message that they are pushing a radical agenda to eliminate Medicare, while introducing zero pieces of legislation to create or incentivize the creation of even one new job, is sticking.

But all of that is politics. The economic reality is that a Boehner-Cantor-driven default will add measurable, possibly prohibitive new costs to everyday activities, personal and commercial investments and leave the nation with unmanageable new operating costs, slowing economic growth and threatening our standing in the global economy.

At least 80, possibly as many as 120 House Republicans have now vowed they will vote against raising the debt ceiling, no matter what the makeup of the compromise reached, no matter the consequences for the economy, for national security, or for America’s future. Speaker John Boehner is caught between a rock and a … well, the smart thing would be for him to work with Democrats, so he can pass something serious and save the country from an economic disaster of his own making.

Speaker Boehner has the authority—and the good fortune to be living in a country where this is possible, politically—to abandon the irresponsible “blow-it-up” caucus in his own party, and work across the aisle to craft serious legislation that will pass and that will work. The 80 to 120 Republicans who are vowing to vote for the deep economic degradation of their country have no role in these negotiations, as they have already bowed out. Mr. Boehner cannot and will not have their votes, which means that the only way he can pass a compromise is to win support from a majority of Democrats.

The Republican majority is forfeiting its majority, and the Speaker of the House is now truly in a position to lead. He can demonstrate that leadership does not come with a false or pigheaded “consistency”, and that members of Congress who swear an oath which necessitates, in part, not doing their jobs in tough binds, cannot be and will not be taken seriously by serious people.

In fact, since they are clearly and resoundingly declaring that this—not raising the debt ceiling, no matter the cost to the American people—is their one and only most personally important goal, they may not be here after 2012 anyway. They will not help Speaker Boehner build a continuing speakership.

Mr. Boehner said yesterday on Fox News Sunday that he did not come to Washington “to be a Congressman”; he came to “do what is right for the country”. Given the cruel bind he now finds himself in, that remark sounded for all the world like a dare to his party to oust him if they could. It was the one strong moment in a weak and sometimes nonsensical series of claims, and it was kind of leadership he should show in the Congress itself.

His allegiance to party must come second to his allegiance to the people of the United States. Inviting calamity is not governing. Tempting fate is not a plan. And charting a course for the jagged cliffs and high seas of default is not fiscal sanity. We know: if there is no agreement by August 2, it will become more expensive, not less, to borrow money, and those higher interest rates will filter through the entire economy.

At the 11th hour of the 24th day of July, just a week before actual default, Speaker Boehner seemed prepared to abandon all reason and craft a new Republican-only solution, in isolation, with no guarantee from the Senate that it could pass. But there are reports Leader Reid and Pres. Obama are both in touch with Speaker Boehner, and are working to ensure a deal goes through.

The problem Boehner faces is that a large number of his own members will not vote for it. He needs Democratic votes, and a lot of them. Whether he likes it or not, the Speaker who would have a one-party House of Representatives is now leader of an awkward, grudging, unlikely coalition of friends and enemies, and he may not so easily distinguish between the two.

There are now less than 8 days until default.

The Speaker is crafting a new “cut, cap and balance” plan, without the cap or the balance parts. He is almost sure to lose more Republicans than just those who have already vowed to vote against any increase in the debt ceiling. And Democrats are unlikely to vote for anything that resembles “cut, cap and balance”. Many have said they will not support anything that touches entitlements without also raising taxes on the rich.

Plus, “cut, cap and balance” was never a serious plan to deal with the debt:

• Most glaringly, required an impossible super-majority in BOTH houses of Congress, in order to pass a constitutional amendment, which would then have to be ratified by two-thirds of all the states;
• It also made little sense, arithmetically: to cut spending—without a plan to pay down outstanding obligations—, cap borrowing—making this more difficult—, then impose a balanced budget—when so much of our economic wellbeing depends on the borrowing power of our government and the security of Treasury bonds—doesn’t add up;
• Speaker Boehner knew it would never pass the Senate and would never be signed into law.

Given the Senate’s position that there should be $2 trillion in new revenue, it would seem Speaker Boehner is, at least for this coming week, Republican in name only, and the de facto leader of a coalition dominated by Democrats. They are sure to frustrate his triumphant spending-cut-only plan with a demand for new revenues; some moderate Republicans might remind him that if the Bush tax cuts are not dealt with in this deal, taxes might go up by far more than the $400 billion over ten years that caused him to walk out of talks last week.

So the question remains: What can you say yes to? Ultimately, the American people are saying they trust Pres. Obama more than they trust Congressional leaders, to deal responsibly with this issue. They trust him to make political sacrifices in order to save the nation’s economy and standing in the world. He may say yes to a bad deal, because that would be the right thing to do. But Speaker Boehner cannot long stand as leader of his party, if he is so willing to be dominated by non-participating back-benchers and Tea Party freshmen.

There is no productive economic value, tested or in theory, to the radical Republican faction’s view that “blowing it up”—an unfortunately violent metaphor—will somehow cure the government of all the ills they reflexively see at every turn. There is no substance, no evidence, no viable strategy, in the plan to let the nation default, then see what happens.

The United States would not be the first nation to default; it would only be the biggest and most indispensable. Default would:

1. Cause 44% of US government obligations to go unpaid;
2. Cause a Constitutional crisis—the Constitution essentially forbids knowingly entering into default;
3. Cause an immediate decline in GDP, first from the 44% of obligations unpaid, then from the massive new “credit crunch” of rapidly increasing interest rates;
4. Cause massive job loss, first in the public sector, then by extension in the private sector;
5. Cause a deep new recession, possibly a depression, while staunching the borrowing power of the government to speed or incentivize recovery;
6. Give immense new power, over American government policy, to foreign creditors, like China.

Yes, Republicans who are currently voting to throw the nation’s government into default are voting to give the totalitarian Communist regime that rules China, our largest creditor, unprecedented influence over American government policy.

Let us be clear: the world has seen defaults before. When Argentina defaulted, there was a run on the banks, massive business interests collapsed, and hundreds of thousands of its 40 million citizens left the country to start from scratch as immigrants elsewhere. If the same thing happens in the “land of opportunity”, where will everyone go?

The nation will be saddled with crushing economic ripple effects, even as the government is prevented from acting to resolve the crisis, and for the first time in our history, one party in Congress will have voted to give a foreign power, astonishingly, power over our policy.

The radicals seem unfazed by this bleak picture; Speaker Boehner cannot be unfazed. He stands at a crucial moment in history, his entire tenure in Congress, and certainly his speakership, about to be defined by what might be the most tragic error in judgment in living memory, on the part of our legislative branch. He will long be viewed by history as the man who steered the nation to calamity or worked with his rivals to right the ship of state.

So, the true bipartisan coalition that needs to emerge, if anything is to pass both houses and be signed into law by August 2, must have the following characteristics:

1. It must push back the next debt ceiling vote until 2013;
2. It must not make cuts into Medicare or Social security that are not paid for with new revenues;
3. It must take hundreds of billions of waste, fraud and abuse out of Pentagon spending;
4. It must include stepped up financial regulatory enforcement, to prevent abuse and win judgments;
5. It must ease the nation off the debt-ceiling model, instead establishing debt-reduction targets and a “safe threshold” measure for future borrowing as a percentage of GDP;
6. It must achieve roughly $2.7 trillion or more in out-year spending reductions, while not cutting deeply into current GDP.

Ron Paul gave Fox News’ Neil Cavuto the latest in a series of Republican presidential campaign advertisements, posing as interview, today as the nation waited to see Congressional leaders gather with Pres. Obama in the White House Cabinet Room. While Cavuto labored to spin the issue toward a Tea Party interpretation of reality, Mr. Paul made the astonishing claim that the least damaging outcome of the debt ceiling negotiations would be a national default.

He then went on to claim that his view represents “American tradition”. While Paul is often a credible and passionate voice in the wilderness, defending individual liberties against the encroachment of modern government and corporate tendencies, his claim that great nations “always default” when they get to a place where default is possible, or that it is American tradition to let entire government agencies collapse, for failure to negotiate a responsible solution, is unfounded and reckless.

When Ron Paul attempted to explain that part of his appeal to independent voters is related to his revulsion to departures from American civil liberties traditions, such as the so-called USA PATRIOT Act, which enabled domestic spying and other constitutionally dubious security powers, Cavuto cut him off and said bluntly he didn’t want to discuss “those issues”.

Even as Fox News ran its “Fox Facts” at the lower right of the screen, revealing its people know and understan that 44% of all government bills will go unpaid, if the debt ceiling is not raised by August 2, Cavuto made the incredible statement that the wealthy “are already paying a lot”—they are paying historically low levels of taxes—and that they have no reason “to pay more for a lousy product”. The network that wrapped itself in the flag to promote war in Iraq, and the USA PATRIOT Act, now says the United States of America is “a lousy product”.

There is an undercurrent of reveling in what some perceive as the demise of a form of government, so-called “big government”, which they believe is a threat to American democracy. There is a trend among far-right conservative ideologues that favors advocating for and trying to bring about the sabotage of the American system of electoral government, on the grounds that it is dangerously “liberal” and that it somehow disregards “traditional” values.

Mr. Cavuto and Mr. Paul today showed themselves both to be guilty of the unfortunate—and one hopes unintentional—failure to recognize when extremist far-right euphemisms penetrate into their more moderate conservative rhetoric. This crossover has been happening for too long, and is an irresponsible attack on informed discourse. It mirrors the false claim that all issues of public controversy are just “opinion”, and radical, factually unfounded smears as legitimate as sincere dealing with circumstance.

In a subsequent interview, Cavuto immediately interrupted his interlocutor, when the consensus position that responsible debt and deficit reduction requires an upward adjustment of tax rates on the wealthiest Americans. Cavuto interrupted in order to shout that the wealthy are “already paying a lot”, then to state his “lousy product” blanket smear against the American government.

That there is intense logical incoherence in this method of reporting—where facts are brushed aside in favor of metaphor, hyperbole and counter-to-fact claims, designed to further a world view, not a solution—is obvious. That this logical incoherence matters to viewers or to editors is not so obvious. Mr. Cavuto’s deliberate manipulation of his interviews, to convey a biased, counter-to-fact line of argument, is indicative of the morally bankrupt tabloid culture promoted by Rupert Murdoch’s tabloids in the United Kingdom.

That is not to say Mr. Cavuto is himself so unworthy of respect, but he, like any other journalist or news analyst, must earn what respect is given, by dealing intelligently with the reality of the world before him. To refute the very facts everyone at the table agrees to, to argue that the failure of the US government to pay 44% of its bills would be of negligible importance, to invite collapse as somehow courageously patriotic, is irresponsible and suggests a lack of seriousness about the responsibility of the press to foster actual understanding of events.

Whether he has been directed, by Bill Sammon—whose emails instructing reporters to slant their reporting for ideological and partisan reasons have shocked and concerned media analysts, citizens and journalists—to slant his reporting, or whether he is voluntarily doing so in order to further the culture that prevails at his network is impossible to know, unless Mr. Cavuto chooses to express his genuine thinking.

Mr. Paul, for his part, must improve the way he manages the unwieldy set of passions that inform his rhetoric. If we were to give him the benefit of the doubt, that he believes honestly that the United States of America does not need its government, or most or much of it, then he would do better to learn specifics, and to explain what, precisely, he would eliminate and how, precisely, he would secure the same services and from whom.

The right-wing doctrine, for instance, that the EPA is some sort of hostile force with no productive value does not contemplate any means of any kind to protect the air and water the American people need to survive. No one argues that function should be militarized, and the very idea that there should be an actual police component to environmental regulation is anathema to the anti-EPA hardliners.

Yet those people need clean water and clean air, in order to avoid the literally thousands of carcinogenic chemicals and compounds that are released into the environment by American industry, all the time. Their children and grandchildren will be less able to live in a nation that has the health security to function as an advanced nation, if clean air and water services are not performed by any entity, with enforcement powers. Yet they profess it is patriotic to throw caution to the wind and allow industries whose entire methodology requires them to release these chemicals into the environment, unless otherwise constrained, to “regulate themselves”.

It is this kind of gap between Mr. Paul’s words and the real world that make him a less serious candidate than he might otherwise be. It is this kind of flippant, sometimes irrational, politicking that wins him the affection of passionate supporters, but not necessarily the respect of the wider electorate or the press and the parties.

In short, Mr. Paul again revealed himself to be more of a rhetorician than a leader, more a critic than a president. After so many years of presenting himself as eligible for the nation’s highest office, he has yet to communicate a credible vision for what he wants the United States of America to be. To get a grip on administrative specifics and how they affect real people’s lives, would go a long way to making his rhetoric more credible.

Saying that default is acceptable, or that it somehow represents “American tradition” is just an astonishing failure to reason with clarity.

When comedians are keeping watch over the deliberate falsehoods dispensed by “mainstream media”, there is something rotten in the culture of our free press. Not because comedians shouldn’t do that work—all citizens should—but because the mainstream media should be committed, at every level, to truth-telling and citizenship. Fox News, in light of the bribery, spying and coercion, scandal engulfing its parent company, has definitively shown how far from that mission its news operation is.

Despite engaging in radical, unfounded and coordinated ideologically-driven crusades against organizations that foster unbiased, non-partisan citizenship and service to the American people, despite its adopting tabloid-style tactics for TV news reporting, despite its relentless accusations, smears and borderline hate speech, against the nation’s chief executive, Fox News is now defending pervasive criminality at News Corp.’s UK tabloids and accusing unbiased media of “piling on” and blowing the scandal out of proportion.

For the record, the founder, chairman and chief executive officer of News Corp., Rupert Murdoch, and his son, James, were called to testify before a select committee of the British Parliament, regarding mounting evidence of a pervasive campaign, over many years, at multiple News Corp. publications, to bribe public officials, illegally spy on innocent civilians, and harass and—according to some reports—intimidate members of the government.

That testimony was anomalous, in part because of the commitment to a free and independent press. But, it was necessary, because the information coming to light so far, throughout years of this developing scandal, suggest there has been a concerted effort to conceal information, kill investigations and use personal, political and commercial influence to obscure the truth. The prime minister of the United Kingdom was forced to extend the current session of Parliament, cut short a trip to Africa, and answer questions about his own personal and professional involvement with key figures involved in the tabloids’ illegal spying.

But Fox News, which has long established its faith-position that all media who do not devoutly, blindly and without remorse, uphold and promote specific tenets of right-wing ideology, are not “balanced” and are in fact part of a vile—use any adjective that fits the animus of the moment (“left-wing”, “communist”, “socialist”, “jihadist”, “terrorist”)—conspiracy to destroy America. Women who claim that women should have rights and privileges of citizenship equal to men are compared to Nazis; Democrats, and the tens of millions of voters that support them, are compared to terrorists and mass murderers.

The level of irrational vitriol and single-party bias at Fox News is now so legendary that around the world, including in tabloid-soaked Great Britain, there is an openly professed fear among public officials and journalists that something as insidious and corrosive as Fox News might emerge there. Laws designed to protect freedom of the press actually include specific provisions designed to reduce the likelihood of the kind of concentration-of-power and intimidation agenda that many believe is the corporate mission at Fox News.

But that aside, the issue of the Fox News reputation for purely biased news reporting aside, it is Fox News that has engaged in a coordinated, persistent and unfounded campaign to smear, undermine, defund and stamp out NPR, the nation’s only public radio service, calling it a socialist conspiracy, a “jihadist inquisition” and accusing it—despite serious analysis showing it to be the least biased radio service in the nation—of pervasive “liberal bias”.

Journalism experts and media analysts are increasingly looking at the anomalous view that there is a “liberal media bias”, which some extreme ideologues on the right have a hard time penetrating. And the clearest explanation emerging from a number of serious studies is literally the problem that extreme ideological conservatives face: that their world view does not correspond to reality, and so serious, credible, unbiased reporting often illustrates a landscape of reality which they cannot tolerate and within which they are not well equipped to debate workable policy solutions.

The Fox News game is a tabloid game—distort, smear, fabricate and exaggerate, remorselessly, and profit from the visceral, primal reaction of an audience which prefers such titillating distortions to information requiring growth, thought, and/or awareness that things can and should be made better in our society. It is the principle of entertaining the public, instead of empowering them. It is Nero playing his fiddle while Rome burned.

Another way to put this is that serious news reporting is about what is actually going on in the world, and though much of the facts to be reported are sad, even tragic, and may indicate extremely disheartening and negative trend-lines, they are reported with solemn respect for the tragedy of human failing. The Fox News tabloid style of reporting deliberately seeks out points of conflict that can be distorted into horrors and threats, and reports on them with glee, passion and hubris, as if to invite the destruction of others in society.

Jon Stewart is not so severe as to allege that Fox News rides an undercurrent of sadistic tendencies, but the absurdity and the tragedy of what the network devotes its airtime to speaks for itself: NPR is, if anything, so unbiased that all you can get there are facts, information and a view of the landscape—some would like to hear more passionate critique and analysis. It is absolutely, and in no way that anyone who is not a diagnosed psychotic could assert, a “jihadist inquisition”.

It is the very soul of what American media should be, if we are all to be citizens of a free republic.

The News Corp. phone-hacking scandal has already come ashore in the United States. The FBI is investigating allegations that News Corp. personnel tried to or did bribe police and/or spy on the families of victims of the 9/11 attacks. Whether there was any such illegal activity at Fox News is not known, and no such evidence has yet come to light. But it would be wiser to distance itself and all of its operations from Mr. Murdoch and those now in police custody than to defend the indefensible or make light of the perverse crime of spying on 9/11 victims.

The Wall Street Journal is an historic and storied publication, known for top-quality journalism and meticulous reporting of facts relevant to financial markets and economic activity more broadly. It is a mainstay of American print media, and has long been known for honoring the bright line that must be drawn between editorial viewpoints and news reporting. Since 2007, however, it is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., and not all of that legacy remains certain to everyone.

And Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. is rapidly losing journalistic and commercial cachet, as the scandal over bribery and illegal phone hacking deepens. Now, at least three members of the Bancroft family, which sold the Wall Street Journal and other DowJones properties to Murdoch in 2007, say they would not have done so, were they aware of the corruption and illegal spying allegedly rampant at his UK-based tabloids.

According to ProPublica and the Guardian:

We will not fall magically into a rising tide of job creation, just by depriving ourselves of services and privileges we have built into our way of life and on which our prosperity depends. And we will not create jobs by privileging those industries that are doing the least to innovate. Innovation is the American way; it is what the nation has always struggled to accomplish, and it must be the cornerstone of a new job-creation boom.

It may be that moments of grave economic pressure put grave strain on a culture’s ability to give voice to and to share a common understanding of core values. It may be that after the financial collapse that struck in 2007 and 2008, the US is facing a crisis of conscience and a struggle to regain its identity. We need to remember that we can take the reins of the 21st century economic landscape, and build the economy of tomorrow.

We could look at the crisis and its aftermath and say, ‘we need some tough love to get us back on track’, and we would probably be right. But we can’t use that sentiment, that truism, to justify bad policy choices or to seek comfort in the idea of a swift break with good social services being better than a slow recovery. The stakes are too high, and the work of building a 21st century world-leading economy requires more vision than that.

It’s not always healthy to divide the world into then and now, before and after, but we can say that many of the old comforts of boundless American resources and economic prosperity are no more; we need to make a future from what we have, and the best resource we have is the ability to invent new paradigms and erect the infrastructure to put them into practice.

One very important clarification must first be made, however, before we can examine with any degree of seriousness how innovation will help to restore our economy to vigorous and viable health: narrowly focused innovations carried out by cartels of privilege to maximize their hold on the marketplace are not true innovations, but mere reiterations of the primitive practice of concentrating wealth to build feudal spheres of influence.

In a 21st century democracy, innovation has to work to the genuine benefit of the democratic landscape of ideas and interests, to the benefit of free individuals seeking to optimize their experience of democratic freedom. Economic innovation that liberates capital flows and actually expands opportunity for ordinary people is of paramount importance in this recovery.

Another way to say this would be to specify that we cannot accept simply “more of the same”, along with the vague promise that eventually it will benefit the hundreds of millions of citizens who are not millionaires or billionaires. We need to demand genuine improvements, in policy and in practice, that restore decentralized economic vigor to our society.

And we have genuine technological innovations that bring with them this very important combination of decentralized capital flows and innovation of business models and economic assumptions. We stand now at the brink of a new industrial revolution, for the information age: the building of a green economy sustainable in terms of its relationship with the natural environment, but also in its use of resources, and its generation of prosperity.

The transition to a smart-grid, clean-energy-based economy entails decentralizing the control of powerful energy cartels over the resources that give life to our society and to its markets. It entails the vital correction of distorted price signals, which presently conceal costs and burden us with wasteful spending. Clean energy will be free of the vast negative externalities that plague our economic system, invite volatility and hamper recovery.

In a society that seeks to be truly democratic, the marketplace for enterprise must continue to innovate in ways that improve the circumstance and opportunity of all members of the society. To stagnate in terms of how intelligently we do things is to withdraw from the mission of a democracy, which is to continually expand the degree of human dignity each citizen can demand and experience without peril.

At the present time, in the United States, we face a choice between major forces that favor the economic status quo, with its massive and accelerating wealth divide, and the power of a new paradigm, which will require the participation of more people, at a higher level of responsibility and education, justly rewarded by a higher standard of living.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and the President’s long-term budget reform, aimed at “winning the future” are sound beginnings, but cautious in comparison to what could be accomplished with a more explicit and committed push for building a green economy.

We need deep reforms to our economic and public policy landscape, but that does not mean we need to gut basic social services in favor of still more unaffordable tax cuts for the superrich. There is no economic theory that can support that policy, and there is no historical evidence of any kind that it would work or has worked, to create jobs.

Instead, we need to evaluate the actual social and economic value of spending (including tax cuts). What we have seen comprehensively, since the Bush tax cuts of 2001, is that when the “supply side”, the superrich and the business sector, are given massive tax cuts for no particular reason, they are not motivated to invest that money in job creation, but rather to hide it away in high-end investment strategies that avoid the volatility of enterprise altogether.

When the ARRA was passed, this began to change, because new tax breaks were targeted toward productive entrepreneurial activities, and there was no guarantee the Bush tax breaks would be extended. Job creation boomed and continued until 2011. But in December 2010, the Bush tax cuts were extended, even for the wealthiest of the wealthy, and the clear outcome has been a month-by-month slowing of overall job creation.

Once again, the history, and the economic logic, is clear: when you give would-be investors in job creation free cash, so that they don’t need enterprise to make them their extra cash, they slow down their job-creation activity. We need policies that will motivate wealth to flow toward new jobs, sustainable jobs, the kind of employment that doesn’t evaporate when investors suddenly find what they consider a sure thing.

So, we need to build a green economy:

• we need to build the infrastructure that will carry clean, renewable energy to all points of consumption;
• we need to retrain industrial workers to produce the technology that will produce clean, renewable energy;
• we need to employ millions of people to maintain and upgrade the infrastructure, install the production capacity and manage our rapid advance toward comprehensive energy efficiency;
• we need to liberate major capital flows to foster this level of technological and commercial innovation…

Some relatively subtle policy shifts can achieve this, but first of all is the standard that we will not continue to prop up, through subsidies, negative externalities or unfair pricing, industries and entities that refuse to be part of this innovation dynamic, this transition to a sustainable economy. Putting a price on carbon emissions will allow us to then motivate the flow of capital away from dirty, risky, expensive fossil fuels, reduce the negative externalities that plague our energy economy, and build the world-first true clean energy economy.

Doing so is a national imperative, because getting beyond combustible fuels is the destination for large-scale energy production. Whoever gets there first will be the world leader in the global economy of the 21st century. To create jobs, we need to innovate, not reward the least imaginative and least cooperative of our entrenched powers-that-be.

Anyone who wants to drive the nation to default, in order to “hurt Obama” or promote some narrow ideological interest, hates this country. There is no other way to see it. People who lust after, and joke about, and court and urge and instigate, the failure of their nation, with the idea that doing so might elevate their faction in the resulting chaos, harbors a deep and pervasive resentment against the majority of the people who will suffer as a result.

They must… because there must be reason in this universe, to help us make sense of the mess and hold back chaos.

A default of any kind is against our founders’ revolutionary principles, let alone a deliberate one. Default violates the founding principles of American democracy, because the founders put the honor and integrity of the United States Congress, of our executive branch, and our electoral system of government, our revolutionary experiment in democracy, ahead of the interests of party and faction.

George Washington famously warned, in his farewell address:

“The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty.”

At this moment in time, we have a credible opportunity to come together around a common need, the need to defend our system of electoral government, the integrity of its officers and the full faith and credit of the nation, against the slings and arrows of misbegotten disharmony. In other words, we can join together, demand statesmanship from everyone at the negotiating table, and save our nation from our own worst habits.

A Congressional refusal to honor our debt, already incurred by so many majority votes in the Congress, is a violation of our Constitution. The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States explicitly requires that all debt incurred through normal operation of our system of government be honored. There is no provision that grants the United States Congress the right to invite, make necessary, or cause default.

It would be a gross and perhaps criminal abdication of responsibility, on the part of those members of Congress who would do so, to bring about an end to over two centuries of responsibly honoring the debts we have already incurred.

Is it even within the realm of most citizens’ comprehension that the United States would borrow money, from its own people, from pensioners, from foreign nations, and major investors, all of whom put their faith in the full faith and credit of the United States government, and then refuse to pay those debts?

Make no mistake: those who would invite default in order to score political points, “hurt Obama” or force massive spending cuts, are not only engaged in a kind of hostage-taking; they are proposing that the United States should be a deadbeat country, with all the connotations you might attach to that description.

Default means the US bond rating —which during Barack Obama’s presidency is at such unprecedentedly beneficial status we can actually sell bonds with negative interest, bonds investors pay us to sell to them, solely because they want the security of the full faith and credit of the United States government— will be downgraded. Downgrading the credit-worthiness of the most stable investment product in the world will likely push the rating of every other investment product in the world down as well.

This would destabilize not only bond markets, but other investment products as well. It would destabilize the entire world economy, the banking system, the ability of ordinary Americans and small businesses to borrow, or to fund their existing debt.

The stability of our bond system underpins the entire global economy, helps us to leverage our power in the world, and to hold back forces hostile to democracy and trade, like fundamentalist Islamofascism and totalitarian communism. The stability of our bond system infuses tense seams of global trade and politics with reason and collaborative problem-solving. In other words, peace and democracy are byproducts of a stable, reliable system of American bond investments.

If you are telling people this is a game, or that we can weasel out of our debt, because somehow Obama doesn’t belong where he is, then you are threatening to destroy America’s influence in the world, undermine our alliances, and urge the nations we do business with to treat us like good-for-nothing cheapskates who can’t be trusted and shouldn’t be. That is against our cultural values, an affront to our revolutionary democratic principles, and shows a lack of seriousness, on every level, about anything one might call “conservative” or “patriotic”.

There is something called statesmanship: if you want to serve your nation, you do the thing that serves your nation, not your tribe. You do the thing that benefits everyone, even if your narrow ideology does not comprehend the problem or the solution. When you sit down to negotiate, with a president who says he will give you something from e every one of his party’s sacred cows, so you can do the same, and there can be a middle ground, and you can come together to solve a problem we have spent 50 years creating, as a nation, you negotiate in good faith; you don’t act like a spoiled child, shout out of turn, and make false accusations and false claims and hold symbolic votes that make the entire institution of the US Congress look like a clique of high-school trend-chasers.

If you love this country, demand statesmanship from the leaders on your side of the ideological divide. If you love your families, and your communities, and the democratic principles of this republic, make sure you have the conscience and the integrity to ask of your leaders that they be willing to sacrifice their ideological determination as much as they are asking the other side to sacrifice theirs. That is how we find common ground; that is how we honor the sacrifice and service of those who have come before; that is how we start down the path of fixing something that was broken by several decades of irresponsible and unfunded manipulations.

The Republican House majority leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) has made himself into a lightning rod for criticism from all quarters, in the debt ceiling negotiations at the White House, by obstructing substantive negotiations two days in a row. Cantor has now taken a hard line that no tax increases of any kind will be contemplated, not even minimal tax hikes on the wealthiest interests in the country. Instead, he is pushing for all debt reduction to come from seniors on Medicare and from the working poor, in need of Medicaid and other services.

In yesterday’s intervention, Cantor reportedly told Pres. Obama there will be no deal of any kind on long-term deficit reduction, and that the debt ceiling should be raised incrementally, in a series of votes, during which “already identified” spending cuts would be passed into law. Obama told Cantor he was taking the issue to the American people and that this was not time for games; he reportedly intends to continue pushing for a negotiated deficit-reduction deal with Republican leaders, despite Cantor’s refusal to participate.

It is now time for Mr. Cantor to withdraw from the debt ceiling negotiations, since he has clearly cast his position as opposed to there being any constructive outcome from the negotiations. The Republican leadership should also examine whether he should retain his leadership position, given what appear to be repeated attempts to sabotage the Speaker’s authority in negotiating with the president and with Senate leaders.

Cantor speaks for a small minority of Americans. New polling shows that well over 80% of Americans believe taxes should be increased on those making more than $1 million a year, and on the world’s most profitable corporations, operating in the US, many of which continue to pay next to zero in taxes to the American government. And even among Republican voters, fully 75% believe increased revenues must be part of any serious effort to reduce deficits and the long-term national debt.

With the Senate under Democratic control, and the White House offering genuine compromise to make a deal workable for Boehner’s Republican majority in the House, Cantor’s opposition to reaching agreement, in service of only 25% of his own party’s voters and in defense of just 1% of the most affluent American taxpayers, is now the single most conspicuous obstacle to reaching agreement to prevent the first ever default on the nation’s national debt (something expressly forbidden by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution) and the potential collapse of the global financial system.

A downgrade in the credit rating of the United States government’s bonds (which both Moody’s and Standard and Poors are now examining) could concurrently devalue all other government borrowing across the world, because no other nation is as economically dominant or resilient as the US, and no other currency or government can boast the long-term stability of the US. Were that to happen, the underlying “safety securities” (reliable long-term government bonds are often cited as the destination of any financial “flight to safety”) underpinning the entire global financial system.

Mr. Cantor’s rhetoric has been hotly contested in both the conservative and liberal press as ill-suited to a serious negotiation, and likely to backfire against the Republican party’s interest. Throughout 2011, analysts have been calling for “leadership” from the House majority, and questioning Speaker Boehner’s “ability to govern”. The public backlash against Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget plan to eliminate Medicare in favor of vouchers to buy private insurance has cast the Republican party as the party that wants to end Medicare.

Mr. Cantor’s behavior has been treated in the press as “tantrum” behavior, “antics” and “acting up”. It has called into question the quality of leadership available in the Republican party, and his willingness to sabotage negotiations that could lead to $4 trillion in long-term debt reduction has wasted his party’s claim to being the party of fiscal responsibility.

It is not clear what is motivating such extreme and counterproductive behavior, or whether Mr. Cantor may be “falling on his sword”, so to speak, in order to open ground for the Speaker to make a deal, in the interests of national security and prosperity. But what is certain is that now, the Democratic party, and the president of the United States will take the campaign directly to the American people, demanding they pressure the Republicans to protect the country’s future, and to protect the middle class, and that will likely require doing what Republicans least want to do, ceding not only on the debt ceiling, but on the question of raising taxes on the wealthy and on mega-rich multinationals.

Has Cantor lost the contest for the Republicans? Maybe. Has he endangered the nation’s economy, the world financial system and national security? Possibly, but not without some chance for preventing the collapse. Has he shown himself to be unfit for the negotiating table, on this issue that could comprehensively determine the long-term global influence of the United States. Yes.

It’s time to let the adults negotiate something that, regardless of party politics or Grover Norquist’s ideology, will actually serve the people of the United States.

IndependentsOfPrinciple.com :: The Tea Party movement, which claims it is driven by a resistance to taxation, is really motivated by a widespread sense of economic disenfranchisement, that is now reaching everyone except the superrich. The populist urgency that underscores all of the Tea Party’s energy is not inherently linked to Grover Norquist’s anti-American “Club for Growth”, but the movement has no leader honest enough to openly demand progressive policy outcomes.

Instead, the popular movement has been co-opted by the establishment crowd that caters to corporate interests, foreign and domestic, and which seeks to shift the tax burden away from wealthy multinationals and billionaire investors, and toward the average American middle class and working family. While many Tea Party adherents say they are independent voters angered by corporate greed and government spending, they have routinely and unquestioningly signed up for rapacious budget reform that continues the pattern of transferring most Americans’ hard-earned household wealth to mega-corporations.

There is a deeper problem that has not been extensively discussed in the mainstream media and which seems to be entirely off the rhetorical radar screen of Tea Party activists and adherents, which is the increasingly unsustainable revenue model being embraced by major corporations. Instead of competing on a level playing field, where quality of service and security of organizational infrastructure are hallmarks of a top competitor, highly profitable corporations are demanding unfettered “growth”, without actually competing to earn their new revenues.

Some of this unearned revenue comes in the form of massive tax credits and subsidies both direct and indirect. Some of it comes in the form of spending policies specifically designed to prop up narrow corporate interests—a good reference here is the corporate “fundraising” conferences (really about profit-seeking, but very much in the mode and mood of fundraisers) held for American corporations looking to see profits soar during the Iraq war… or the grossly unnecessary and inexplicable oil subsidies… or the banks’ recent win on the issue of SEC doubling swipe fees.

All of these practices repulse the conscience of the typical Tea Party adherent, yet the Tea Party has not made a serious effort to support progressive efforts to reverse these corrosive economic trends. Though the inspiration is a resistance to wasteful redirections of the wealth of the American people, the very movement caught up in this populist mindfire seems entirely committed to opposing the progressive outcomes its rhetoric suggests it would demand.

There is a very real-world result to this rhetorical conflict: The populism of the Tea Party movement resonates as half-baked and devoid of real solutions, and the same interests whose unprecedented success, during the years 2001-2008 prompted this defiant outside attack on the Republican leadership, are benefitting from the distorted budgetary rhetoric of the supposedly populist movement.

Independent voters have to take this seriously: the United States of America is strongest when the middle class is growing, spans the society, controls the purse-strings and the rate of innovation, and when the space for genuine opportunity and enterprise is open to as many people as possible, from as many diverse places and interests, and the virtues of democracy can play out in a civil and constructive manner.

If the influence of the middle class is eroded, if new entrants are barred by the slashing of education, healthcare and job-training programs that make it possible to expand the reach and influence of the middle class, if our democratic process is rigged to undermine the aspirations of most Americans, then our democracy is cheapened and the resilience of our economic prosperity is degraded.

Ideological biases are so deeply ingrained in our nation’s political discourse, however, that our media often report less the truth of the matter and more the hot-button words that seem to tell the story with color and energy. This subtle distortion divides people who might otherwise come together to deal with real problems in a pragmatic way. And what so many citizens, especially among independent, or unaligned, voters, feel is missing is some non-partisan, non-ideological way to address the populist complaints of most Americans, about having lost influence in the overall terrain of our politics.

To get there, whether one is a true-blue Obama progressive or a Tea Party activist, independent voters need to recognize that there are commonalities in their inspiration and in their aims, and that a pragmatist approach to dealing with the nation’s current position, in terms of shaping a sustainable future of American prosperity and liberty, may mean coming together outside the narrow bounds of ideological language.

Should the wealthy and the poor be so far removed from one another’s sphere of interest that they view the nation and its government as fundamentally different entities, and must be at war with one another’s interests? Neither pragmatic progressive independents nor Tea Party adherents who profess displeasure with the Republican party think they should be. So there is no reason for them to work from opposite ends of an ideological spectrum to undermine efforts to reverse that trend.

But there are many in Congress, at this moment, who have committed their political fortunes to the idea that the other side must be opposed, undermined, even sabotaged, even where the public good is at risk, at all costs. For them to reverse course, or to admit that there is a common sense of populist urgency, regarding basic principles of democracy, spanning the political spectrum, may seem to them too risky a transition.

The Tea Party says it is not committed to furthering the fortunes of such figures, says it is not ideological, says it only wants to make sure the American people remain free from oppressive and inefficient patterns of economic waste. Its rhetoric suggests a popular demand for pragmatic progressive outcomes, carried out through a non-partisan coalition of common-sense-minded public servants.

It is time for the more creative and sincere Tea Party adherents to stop being co-opted by the RNC and the Club for Growth, and to speak for the shared interest of all of the American people—not through rapacious budget cutting that only worsens the wealth divide, but through smart, pragmatic progressive policies that build community and honor citizenship and the future our children will actually have to be prepared to live in. It is time to stop pretending that tax cuts for the superrich make everyone else free, when in fact they only bind our hands, our voices, and our children’s future.

IndependentsOfPrinciple.com :: The view taken by some in Washington that major reductions in the United States’ national debt can be achieved without addressing revenues is essentially a pledge to do nothing serious about the debt or deficit. The reason: the ideology of supply-side tax-cut-only social policy not only requires, but admires “deficit spending”.

Some critics of this way of thinking, most notably fiscally conservative, pro-middle-class Republicans, have called it “voodoo economics”—a mystical and unverifiable faith tradition posing as economic policy, which only serves to divert wealth away from the middle class, draining the federal budget to deliver wealth to the already wealthy.

Some take the view that this is overly harsh, but the question of deficit spending is clear: in the 1980s, during the heyday of “Reaganomics”, the US fell into massive, historically unprecedented budget deficits, and proponents of the policy actively talked up the virtues of spending beyond our means. You can’t get credit if you don’t borrow, goes the argument.

In the 1990s, it was a Democratic president that wrested the economy back from the deficit brink, actually balancing the budget, curbing spending (through the Reinventing Government program) and generating record budget surpluses. It was, then, the most radically supply-side-favorable administration, that of George W. Bush, that presided over the most massive spending increases to date. (The bulk of federal budget rises during the Obama presidency comes from actually including the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in the budget.)

What’s more, the radical spending increases of the Bush presidency were almost entirely unfunded. (There was no sound fiscal plan for funding the Iraq or Afghanistan wars, the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit, the doubling of regular Pentagon spending, or the tax cuts.)

The point is not intended to be partisan; the point is that supply-side theorists demand (and activate) massive deficit spending and have never presented any serious plan to curb deficit spending. At present, supply-side plans that demand a balanced budget with no solution to revenue shortfalls are as unserious and anti-middle-class as supply-side policies have tended to be.

Between the years 2001 and 2004 (in which George W. Bush’s two record tax giveaways to the ultrawealthy were passed), the median income of the wealthiest 1% of American households jumped by 17 times the total median income for the rest of American households, nearly half of what it had taken the previous 50 years for that wealthiest 1% to gain.

The 2001 tax cut was not stimulative and it did not “create jobs”; it was the single largest transfer of wealth in world history, it plunged the federal budget into massive deficits, and left the economy reeling: household borrowing at record highs, median household income falling, and less economic clout bound up in the middle class and small businesses than at any time since the 1890s.

Any independent voter seeking to make sense of all the talk about debt and deficit, about the debt ceiling question, and about the hype and hyperbole coming from the Washington press corps, needs to first consider that our political and economic system demands above all things a vibrant and resilient middle class. Continuing, or even radically expanding, policies that have so degraded the middle class, will not cure what ails our economy or our federal budget model.

More precisely: any approach to debt and deficit that does nothing concrete to address shortfalls in revenue —almost entirely attributable to the voodoo economics of the period 2001-2008— is not a plan to deal with debt or deficit, but a political manipulation posing as economic policy. Fiscal conservatives owe it to their movement and to the people who believe in their principles to 1) be honest about the viability of unfunded policy adjustments, and 2) make sure they take concrete action to shore up the middle class first of all.

IndependentsOfPrinciple.com :: Spain’s May 15th movement is often called the revolution of the indignados, indignant at the failure of elective government to solve the problems that increasingly define the lives of ordinary people. The complaint, succinctly, is that the powers that be are collaborating in a systemic failure to live up to the rigors of a healthy, legitimate social contract.

Working people, young adults with university degrees but next to zero job prospects, families pushed from their homes by a real estate boom now shown to be a speculator’s wild west show, congregate, organize assemblies, vote on matters of policy, and demand meaningful political change. They argue together, though often in clashing voices, that the political system is rigged against the majority of ordinary citizens.

The demand has been centered on an opposition to all forms of violence, and a call for civic cooperation, for citizenship and for a recommitment to enforcing and expanding basic rights. It is a movement that draws inspiration from Tunis, from Cairo, from Madison, which positing a new world in which the people, and not the powerful, decide.

Yesterday, in Barcelona, the pressures of the moment briefly turned to violence, and it has to be said the May 15th movement, decentralized as it may be, denounced the violence of some protesters and called for an end to all forms of violence.

The clashes between demonstrators and police, the Mossos d’Esquadra, seem to have begun when the police tried to disperse throngs of thousands who sought to block access to the Parc de la Ciutadela, where Catalunya’s Parlament does business. The estimated 2,000 demonstrators wanted to stop action on a budget they say will harm ordinary Catalans.

The police reportedly moved into the crowd, trying to open safe passage for members of the Parlament, around 6:30, but as the protesters would not move, the action turned to physical force. Many were injured in the clashes, and the action radicalized the demonstration.

Several members of the Parlament were intimidated or assaulted, being sprayed or having paint thrown at them. Police used batons against people in the crowd, with photos showing what appear to be assaults on non-violent bystanders and people trying to flee. The melee was the latest in a series of security missteps, but the movement insists violence is not an option and can never be part of their protest actions.

The last violent clash in Barcelona came in late May, when the Mossos d’Esquadra tried to clear the Plaça Catalunya by force, in order to make room for a soccer celebration. Over 120 people were injured, and the movement became more entrenched.

There seems to be a bias among agents of the political system toward the idea that they are the legitimate representatives of a functioning social contract. But democracy demands recognition of the fragility of that shared obligation to abide by rules of civility and deliberative government.

It is often the presumption of one’s own superiority that leads to the breakdown of the social contract, and a descent into violence. Movements like the May 15th indignados and the Egyptian uprising test the boundaries of political power, calling into question the devotion of those who wield power to the principle that even they, or they especially, are subject to the law’s constraints.

Non-violent protest aims to show the moral inferiority of those who wield power unjustly, thus to pressure them to shift position and return some power to the people. It is a way for people who do not hold political power to enforce the terms of the social contract.

Spain enjoys a functioning representative democracy, but many of the Spanish people feel the system ignores their needs and tramples on their rights. Yesterday in the Plaça Sant Jaume, one of the chants heard with coordinated vocal force was “No Más Crisis”, essentially “no more crashes”. It was a demand that banks not be rewarded for causing economic chaos and that social infrastructure not be degraded by austerity and rescue packages.

The conservatives now in charge in Catalunya are seen as being too close to the banks, and too distant from the people. But the movement of the indignados is not just opposition to the political right; the complaint has gathered force because the popular view is that in Spain, all parties are collaborating in a wave of fiscal actions that seem likely to prolong the crisis and further diminish the political influence of ordinary people.

There does not seem, for instance, to be a recovery plan, as was implemented by the Obama administration in the United States. Spaniards have now lived three to four years with the agony of economic collapse, and there is a sense of vertigo, that the IMF and EU might be moving in with imposed austerity measures most people believe will make matters far worse.

45% of young adults are unemployed across Spain, and yesterday, the defiance of political leaders who refuse to hear the popular complaint about misguided priorities was accompanied by a police action seen by some as an attempt to violently suppress the people’s voice. When the social contract is in such crisis, tensions flare.

The attacks on members of Catalunya’s Parlament were unjust and undemocratic, but there can be no room for police using force against unarmed civilian demonstrators. Far from showing the illegitimacy of Spain’s new citizen assembly movement, the Catalan situation is showing how desperately fragile is the standing social contract for many in this economically besieged society.

The appropriate response to rhetorical and ideological disharmony is conversation. It is in the debate of ideas that a legitimate democratic government finds its footing. Politicians in Spain need to be clear: it is a legitimate democratic social contract we seek to uphold and expand, not an established order of haves and have-nots.

Today, the Spanish press are reporting that one in three Spaniards is now eating worse than before the crisis. Lower quality food, less nutritional value, smaller portions, more health problems. And many believe the one-in-three figure is understated—people will complain of hardship, but are averse to report personal weakness or a failure to be responsible about their health, whatever the cause.

One of the most important differences between what is taking place among the movement of the indignados and what is perceived to be the case, I’m the press, is the manner in which the protest movement has committed itself not only to civility, but to civics and to social action.

While conservative politicians who favor dismantling corporate regulation focus on an incident in Barcelona, the cause of which remains unclear, the indignados across Spain have joined with vulnerable neighbors who are on the verge of being evicted due to what are widely perceived as predatory lending practices.

Antisocial lending practices, which have ruined the finances of individuals, families, towns and cities, and may lead to the nationalization of four bank chains by the end of the year, have motivated a backlash among people of every age and socio-economic class who firmly believe lives should not be ruined by that way in a democratic society.

There are obligations unique to those in positions of leadership or public service, and powerful interests that benefit from the organizational health and cooperative efficiency of a free society have similar responsibilities. Spain’s movement to redefine democracy by involving citizens more directly is a sign of how the lessons of Tunis and Cairo are enriching the landscape of modern democracy, and it should be an example to those who serve.

Pres. Barack Obama upset many in Israel yesterday, when he called for a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected the idea, saying it would not allow Israel to effectively defend itself, and conservative opponents of Obama are now actively trying to vilify him as having abandoned Israel. This is not only not true; it is a dangerous lie that ignores the fact that Obama’s roadmap to peace strongly favors Israeli security.

At no time has Pres. Barack Obama threatened Israel, or sought to undermine its security. That his view of what will work best to secure a lasting peace between two states living side by side differs from the view of those who do not want two states is no surprise. No commentary based on the bias of those who do not favor a negotiated settlement should be taken seriously by anyone who favors Israeli security.

Hard-liners in Israel, under then PM Ehud Olmert’s questionable leadership, fought two needless wars of aggression that achieved nothing to improve Israel’s security, but which did entrench Israel’s enemies and greatly expand their influence along the Lebanese and Gazan borders. The hard-line solution is not always the wisest, and those who care about the state of Israel need to remember this: true power is exercised not by force of arms, but by mercy, wisdom and forethought.

Decisions based on fear often lead to overreactions, poor planning and counterproductive outcomes. In the case of Israel, such missteps could erode fragile diplomatic arrangements on which the future of Israel depends. The panic and hysteria that have overtaken some on the far right, over a US president, in trying to act as mediator between two people’s facing not so much political as existential questions, calling for intelligent compromise, is shameful and could endanger Israel’s security.

There has been a consistent pattern, over decades, in Israeli-Palestinian politics, whereby rhetoric of moderation has moved the cause of moderation forward and rhetoric of hostility has ignited or intensified hostility. The art of statecraft is, in many ways, the art of doing what is right, despite the inability of soundbite media to fashion an honest rhetoric to address the issues.

Netanyahu stands at an historic crossroads: in the wake of two widely unpopular, poorly conceived and ultimately botched wars of choice, Israel finds the region where it has so long been the only democratic state actively democratizing, from the ground up. This is a positive development for the region, for Israel and for all of humanity, and it needs to be addressed appropriately, not according to the reflexive panic of other times.

Israel, like the United States, has an opportunity to quietly guide and reward the democracy movement, not dictating policy or imposing its will, but making friends, and keeping them. Nothing is more vital to the future of Israeli security, and hard-liners whose minds are lost in other wars need to take note of the actual truths of this moment in history.

Heavy-handed security clampdowns are now perceived across the world, by Israel’s allies and by its neighboring populations, as evil acts, illegitimate under law and politically impardonable. A hard-line politics directly endangers Israel’s ability to play a credible, humane, leading role in this period of widespread democratization.

This is the moment democrats and peacemakers, statesmen and ordinary people have been dreaming of for decades, across the region, and it cannot, under any circumstances, be allowed to slip away. But as in all places in all times, there are hard-liners who are invested in the paradigm of conflict and hostility, who do not see a future for their own way of thinking in a world of peace and security.

In Israel, specifically, there is a hard-line view that only by affirming every security-oriented action taken over the last four decades can Israel be made secure: that is largely because those individuals were the progenitors of those actions and cannot conceive of a world in which their actions were not the only, the best and the most necessary of all possibilities. Those who have invested everything in the politics, the mindset and the vocabulary of conflict, have a hard time transitioning into the age of peace and stability, and that, more than anything, can undermine a nation’s ability to negotiate effectively.

But on the matter of what Pres. Obama actually said yesterday: he did not say that Israel should confine itself to the borders of June 1967, and he most certainly did not suggest that when the borders of two states agreed upon, Israel should be surrounded by foreign military forces. What he did say was that the 1967 “lines” should be the “starting point” for negotiations regarding territory, and that the final agreement should result from mutually agreeable “swaps”.

In no way was there a suggestion that Israel should be less secure or that Israel should be forced to agree to anything not “agreeable”, from its perspective. The problem of the moment, however, appears to be that Mr. Netanyahu speaks vaguely of “generous compromises”, only to reject outright any consideration of any kind (let along compromise) on several issues without which no Palestinian government could make any move toward peace.

Seasoned diplomatic negotiators in Israel, in Europe and in the US, all of them invested in Israel being secure as the two-state solution goes forward, are accusing Netanyahu of short-sighted political intransigence. And in furtherance of what seems to be blocking a reasonable approach to serious negotiations about what is actually going on, on the ground, numerous hard-line organizations have begun trying to raise money by cynically raising false alarms based on deliberate distortions of what Pres. Obama called for.

What’s more, the policy enunciated by Pres. Obama is not new: the speech was applauded by the Quartet of moderating powers (the US, joined by the EU, the UN and the Russian Federation), and it has long been considered to be the only reasonable starting point from which a viable peace settlement could be reached.

What is new is that Pres. Obama signaled the willingness of the US to push for those negotiations to begin in earnest. That push is an invitation to PM Netanyahu to act in the interests of his people, and commit to moving forward with the difficult, but urgently necessary work of resolving this conflict.

After what was described as a tense meeting with Pres. Obama today, Netanyahu id they agreed that “illusions” about what is possible should not guide the negotiations, because the resulting agreement would not be tenable. What he did not seem to notice, however, is that a viable two-state solution requires balance, fairness, and transparency, that compromises have to be not so much “generous” as difficult, to have the desired effect—that of purchasing a viable peace.

To love and support the people of Israel is to do more than focus with anger and worry on the inexcusable atrocities to which previous generations were subjected. It means to defend the right of the people of Israel to be led by people who support, no matter how inconvenient, the ethical principles of the Jewish faith and the political virtues of modern democracy. It means supporting the right of the people of Israel to establish a viable cooperative peace with their neighbors.

Pres. Obama is absolutely committed to the security of Israel, now and after the two-state solution is reached, and during the negotiations. And, he is committed to helping the people of Israel, and their Palestinian neighbors, achieve a peace that is worthy of the great and noble ideals on which Israeli democracy was founded.

Nothing will make Israel more secure than Israel finding a way to allow for the Palestinian people to enjoy the same freedom, democracy and security to which Israel’s leaders feel their constituents are entitled. Getting there will not be easy, but it requires something more intelligent than the fantasy that without giving anything, something can be secured.

Barack Obama’s security policy is pro-Israel. It favors Israel’s culture of faith and democracy. It favors the security of the state of Israel, and of the Israeli people. And, perhaps most importantly, Obama’s Israel policy is not fatalist: instead, it favors the idea that Israel and its leaders are capable of achieving the seemingly impossible task of harmony, security and democracy, without waiting for circumstances to dictate outcomes.

There is a simple response to the GOP hardliners who say bin Laden’s demise justifies waterboarding and other torture techniques used under the Bush administration, and that is: if it had worked, it would not have taken 10 years to locate bin Laden. What “led” the US intelligence community, and SEAL Team Six to bin Laden’s fortified compound was long-running, diligent intelligence work of the kind that is hampered and obstructed by irrational fits of violence, torture and vengeful behavior.

It was not as a result of torture and waterboarding that bin Laden was found, but in spite of those acts and after long, complicated and persistent efforts made to correct the missteps, bad intel and general deviance of the previous administration’s unconstitutional approach to security policy.

From the outset, the practice of physically and emotionally abusive interrogation techniques was slowing down the investigative process and hampering the ability of investigators and intelligence officers to get useful information from those they interrogated. What analysts found when they looked at the history was that abusive interrogations shut down the flow of useful intelligence, and provoked more violent, more intransigent militancy; where techniques were softened, in line with US and international law, there was better information available.

In 2008, a report [PDF] became available detailing the long history of disputes among agencies regarding Bush-era interrogation techniques. According to the New York Times:

In 2002, as evidence of prisoner mistreatment at Guantánamo Bay began to mount, Federal Bureau of Investigation agents at the base created a “war crimes file” to document accusations against American military personnel, but were eventually ordered to close down the file, a Justice Department report revealed Tuesday.

The report, an exhaustive, 437-page review prepared by the Justice Department inspector general, provides the fullest account to date of internal dissent and confusion within the Bush administration over the use of harsh interrogation tactics by the military and the Central Intelligence Agency.

The controversy over waterboarding has raged for 7 years now in public discourse, and it was even more intense in the private exchanges between agencies before it became public knowledge. But one salient fact remains: according to Dick Cheney’s own argument that waterboarding was used sparingly, it was used 267 times on just three prisoners. That’s an average of 89 times per individual.

In Spanish bullfighting, when a matador moves in for the final strike, and aims to kill, efficacy is considered to be doing the job in one perfect blow. A bullfighter who takes 10 or 15 or 19 strikes to knock the bull to the ground is jeered and hated by the crowd, partly for the cruel nature of what is taking place, partly for his abject failure to perform. If after 89 attempts at waterboarding, no information that wouldn’t require nearly a decade to unravel (or correct) emerged, how effective can such a method be?

The logic used even by the White House was that waterboarding would force the near immediate release of useful information. They used the “ticking time-bomb” defense. The logic was that one or two or three interrogations, relying solely on the effective use of language to gain information, was too slow, too fuzzy, too imprecise. But it took an average of 89 attempts at waterboarding to deal with these three prisoners of whose interrogation Cheney spoke so proudly.

How, then, could anyone make the argument that this was an “effective” interrogation technique. If it took another 8 years to locate bin Laden, the information was clearly not very useful, not very relevant and certainly not expedient. What’s more, the compound in which bin Laden was located and killed did not even exist yet, when the CIA was waterboarding those three individuals, allegedly at Dick Cheney’s urging, or authorization. None of them could have known where it was.

Waterboarding did not lead to Osama bin Laden’s killing, any more than any other event that took place in 2002 or 2003 led to his killing. What led to bin Laden’s killing —inside a structure that had not been built yet, when Dick Cheney ordered US personnel to use techniques defined as torture under existing law— 7 to 8 years later, under a different administration, in a new decade, in a country whose entire system of government has changed, mired in a Taliban war as intense as the one in Afghanistan… what led to SEAL Team Six raiding that compound was all of the hard work of far more honest public servants than those who believe the US can only do well when it does the wrong thing.

The idea that torture or waterboarding were necessary, or even contributed in some indirect way, to make the investigation into bin Laden’s whereabouts a success is a smear of the worst kind, and precisely the kind of negative propaganda enemies like al Qaeda would love to be true. But it is not true. It is a perversion of the mind to which certain hardline elements are given, who believe more in the use of violence than they do in the guiding principles of American democracy.

It is also a smear against all of the men and women sacrificing their time, their quality of life, their safety and their lives, in service of the nation; it suggests they are not defending a great democracy committed at every level at every moment to upholding the rule of law, but rather that they are fighting in service of something less worthy, less noble, less in keeping with the founding values of the nation they love.

No credible authority on interrogations, on the tactical strengths of the American intelligence community or military service personnel, could stoop so low as to make the absurd claim that only as a result of torture was it possible to locate and to eliminate Osama bin Laden. We know that abusive interrogation techniques, even torture, were used under certain aspects of the Bush administration’s security policy. We know just as well that no substantive intelligence that did not require many years’ worth of untangling emerged from those torture sessions.

There was even testimony before Congress suggesting that an individual who underwent the procedure known as waterboarding —whichis, by definition, oxygen deprivation— several dozen times, or 89 or 100 or more, could suffer irreparable brain damage, thus eliminating the one (theoretically) useful source of information involved in the process: the clarity of the detainee’s memory.

The tensions between FBI and CIA interrogators, especially regarding the alleged usefulness of torture as an interrogation technique, seem, in time, to have boiled down to a contest between two fundamental ideas: on the one hand, the FBI’s contention that interrogations don’t always turn up the information that one seeks, and so must always be supplemented with extensive field work and parallel investigative techniques, while waterboarding and abusive methods inhibit cooperative prisoners from sharing useful information; on the other hand, the insistence of some that without such abuses, they would be helpless to learn anything of value.

In retrospect, especially now in the cold light of morning, as the world adjusts to the idea that bin Laden is no longer out there, that dispute now looks simpler than ever: there were some who knew that getting information takes time, honest effort, and serious, highly skilled, committed hard work, and there were some who were feeling rushed, who were more given to impatience, brutality and the eschewing of basic principle than to trust in the quality of the people doing the information gathering.

To highlight the views of those committed professionals who believed that upholding the rule of law was not only necessary, but ultimately smarter and more effective, Ali Soufan, a former FBI special agent, told Congress about the abusive interrogation techniques. He said:

People were given misinformation, half-truths, and false claims of successes; and reluctant intelligence officers were given instructions and assurances from higher authorities…

I wish to do my part to ensure that we never again use these … techniques instead of the tried, tested, and successful ones – the ones that are also in sync with our values and moral character. Only by doing this will we defeat the terrorists as effectively and quickly as possible.

Soufan noted that CIA agents involved in the interrogations shared his view that waterboarding was not only unhelpful, but was counterproductive. Despite the use of such techniques at least 267 times (according to the CIA’s own records) on just two of the “high value detainees”, the result was less meaningful testimony and unreliable and flagrantly false claims.

It has long been known —and any mildly reasonable person could find the same by simple logic— that torture induces people to lie. It produces false confessions, and is in fact favored by totalitarian regimes that are seeking false confessions. It was an aberration for American interrogators to resort to torture, and amounted to the relegation of the investigative process to the backward, hamfisted manipulations of backwater dictators; it was not worthy of a great open democracy, it did not honor those who were part of it, and it did not serve the security interests of the United States.

The election of Barack Obama to the White House is not the direct cause of bin Laden’s death, either, any more than any other event in 2008 is the direct cause. But there is something about Obama’s presidency that has made it possible to carry out this kind of raid, and which helps to account for why it happened now and did not happen in the years 2001-2009: the president and his security establishment are committed to 1) getting the information right, and 2) acting decisively on good information, to actually achieve an outcome that furthers the national security objective of undoing al Qaeda, in a substantive way.

Pres. Obama did not pursue bin Laden by diverting 90% of the nation’s military muscle to another nation, Iraq, where there was no immediate cause for war. He did not propose to spend $1 trillion fighting that unnecessary war, while making the ridiculous claim to the American people that doing so would put pressure on militia leaders hiding in the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan. He did not try to alter the political or legal substance of our national security policy to make it more like Hosni Mubarak would have liked.

He committed bright public servants, brave intelligence officers and the most skilled military strike force possible, to tracking, locating and capturing or killing bin Laden. That’s how bin Laden was tracked, located and killed.

Osama bin Laden was killed in spite of the sad and counterproductive use of torture techniques, not because of it.

The reason people spontaneously went into the streets to celebrate the event was not that bin Laden’s death is synonymous with joy or the culture is obsessed with him. And it’s not merely the fact that this moment allows for a sigh of relief, after 10 years of war. It was because people now feel there is a meaningful alignment between the principled public service of government officials and their ability to tackle the most dangerous problems. Ideology and testosterone-laden rhetorical distractions are not interfering with the work of governing, so the leadership are now making better choices, more in keeping with our values and more conducive to outcomes in line with our goals.

This is one example of the efficacy of Obama’s approach to public service and of what he demands of his lieutenants. The raid was daring not only tactically, but also politically: the clearest precursors to the raid were Jimmy Carter’s failed hostage-rescue in Iran and the infamous “Black Hawk down” incident in Mogadishu.

It takes a certain seriousness of purpose and a certain commitment to service to put one’s political future so much at risk, and it takes a respect for the men and women on the ground, for the command structure and for the wisdom of thoughtful, well-informed, diligent, purposeful planning, to make this kind of strike possible.

The people of the United States owe a debt of gratitude to the courage and talent of those who built the body of (real) evidence, who planned the COA (courses of action) and who carried out the strike. And it owes a debt of gratitude to the leadership style that puts the virtues of American democracy, of its citizens, its servants and its applications, ahead of the urge to do flashy things that intimidate or threaten.

Bin Laden was killed in May 2011, because the United States has put aside bluster in favor of focus. That cannot be said of any of the people or agencies that participated in the dark, shameful history in which torture was used in place of the best, most serious, most effective effort. By doing what American democracy demands, American agents, led by an American president, were able to do what American democracy requires.

The strike on bin Laden’s compound shows that torture is not required, and serves to highlight just how counterproductive it may have been. We are on a better track now, and this, we should celebrate.

Now is the time for Republicans to lay down their arms and help Pres. Obama build a better, safer, more cooperative American future. In just a few short days, they have lost the birther issue, the budget issue, and, more importantly, the national security issue. They have no candidates with any military or command experience, and Barack Obama has just accomplished what George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, with all they did to alter US and world politics to empower their administration, could not do in seven: he killed Osama bin Laden.

The Republican party has to take note of the importance of this moment, and cede ground on Capitol Hill, where they still have some chance of influence, if they can be part of the solution. Of course, there are firebrand radicals in the party who have little to offer other than their relentless firebrand radicalism, but the smart Republicans have to take note of just how much the landscape has changed since November 2010.

Gov. Scott Walker tried the GOP’s most extreme angle, a virtual government takeover of contract negotiations, pension plans and workers rights, with the now explicitly stated purpose of making it easier for Republicans to get elected, by gaming the system. His corrosive overreach has unleashed a nationwide backlash against the kleptocratic and corporatist bent of the party. The middle class is beginning to see the value of working-class activism, across party lines.

There have even been rumors that run as far as suggesting moderate (less partisan) Tea Party groups siding with local labor groups to challenge such power grabs. The extremist budget put forward by Rep. Paul Ryan has sparked such outrage among Medicare recipients and people who value their children’s educational futures, the resulting backlash has left that document seeming like the emblematic example of irrationally inhumane public policy.

What’s more, Pres. Obama has proposed a deficit-reducing budget that seems to have a more credible, more workable, more tangible, and less inhumane approach, to reducing deficits by over $4 trillion over ten years. Republicans are reeling from the policy losses, and the president has gained ground on which to run his 2012 campaign with each step.

The situation is so dire that the GOP now appears to be splitting between the desperadoes and fundamentalists, who demand some thinly veiled racist commentary or some perversely wishful push for prolonged economic hardship, to undermine the president, and those who, like Speaker Boehner himself, now say oil subsidies, might need to go, and the Ryan budget was little more than “a blueprint” or a valiant if misguided way of “provoking debate”.

Maybe the biggest problem the GOP faces is in the intellectual composition of their own vanguard: the party’s leading lights are having a very hard time letting go of the laissez-faire deregulatory fascination of the last half century, despite the nation’s cultural return to a depression-era mindset, where government need not be big or small, left or right, but honest and good at solving problems real people face.

That doesn’t line up well with a party platform that continues to favor the economic dogma of a decade of declining wages, the security-blanched fantasy of a cadre of leaders who started and could not finish not one, but two, of the nation’s longest and least effective wars. The GOP is facing a self-fashioned reality crisis, in which the party’s image is rooted in the same under-thought ideas that serve as backdrop to the very crises Obama is hard at work solving.

President Obama is talking up bipartisanship, and the GOP has to pay heed: this is the president offering them a place in the collaborative work of solving epic problems; they are the ones who need that offer more. Without a hard tack to the center, the Republican party of 2011 faces a very serious limitation: an effective president is making it clear whose ideological dilly-dallying has left the nation with so much to struggle against.

The GOP will have to argue, as Wall Street’s most discredited bankers did, that since they screwed everything up so royally, they are the only ones equipped to undo what was done. They are, however, hampering even that desperate strategy by proposing nothing that would in any way undo what they did to create the mess.

Their argument is that after a couple of years of honest hard work from someone unlike them, to undo the mess they created over several decades, it’s time to let them do more of the same. Wisconsin, the Ryan budget, the silly adoration for Donald Trump’s racist innuendoes, and now the killing of bin Laden, have thrown the whole political landscape into high contrast: it is now clear who is the adult in the room, and who is still dilly-dallying on partisan and ideological obsessions.

The GOP has a window of opportunity, before its most visible figures dive headlong into the mudslinging they are sure to bring to the 2012 race, to moderate its rhetoric, steer to the center and become part of the Obama problem-solving agenda. To do otherwise would be, more than foolish and short-sighted, a sign that their leaders are not so much leaders as devotees of political sabotage.

That will not give anyone the impression they are worthy of the nation’s highest office, or of holding the pursestrings, for that matter.

The United States Supreme Court is preparing to hear oral arguments in a landmark campaign finance case, in which a wealthy candidate who chose not to use public matching funds alleges those funds amounted to an illegal enhancement of his opponent’s speech. That assisted speech, the argument goes, was an unconstitutional government intrusion into the territory of his own free speech rights.

Observers say the right-leaning now convincingly corporatist Roberts Court appears likely to side with the wealthy candidate, and effectively outlaw any and all public assistance that would give the non-wealthy a hope of competing. If this is their verdict, the Court should add to its finding that no candidate can spend more than a nominal amount of personal wealth to expand his or her own speech beyond that of a less affluent opponent.

At present, campaign finance laws bar any individual from contributing more than a certain amount to an individual campaign for elective office, but they do not bar any individual from collectively fundraising massive amounts from wealthy friends and business associates, and now, thanks to the Roberts Court’s ruling in Citizens United v. FEC, there is no limit on the wealth outside groups can devote to campaigning on “issues” related to a political campaign.

There is, consequently, no way around the following problem: these ruling are privileging the right of wealthy individuals to vastly amplify their own speech, while directly and aggressively imposing limits on the ability of the non-affluent to campaign effectively. There arises, then, a Constitutional imperative: the reversal of the anomalous legal scenario in which the wealthy can simply spend unlimited sums to campaign without building a movement.

If the logic of Citizens United and of what appears to be an impending ban on public matching funds for less wealthy campaigns is that speech rights should not be unnecessarily constrained, including by the expansion of any party’s speech by rights another party does not enjoy, then the spending of personal wealth on political campaigns should also be banned.

At the very least, an incremental step could be taken: Congress could require that no candidate for public office use any funds that are in any way connected to government revenues. Any money emerging directly or indirectly from present or past tax credits or non-taxation would be barred.

This would mean that no enterprise whose revenues over a ten year period are linked to a specific tax credit of some kind could donate any of that money to political spending, whether on issues or on candidates. Billionaires who have benefitted from capital gains tax reductions, bankruptcy protection or other public assistance, or who have outstanding business with the federal government —defense contractors, for instance— could not spend to influence elections.

But most importantly, individuals who fit into these categories could not use personal or corporate wealth to seek office. Gone would be the days of public servants starting out with a personal “war chest” of $5,000, while their opponents start with $100 million. Billionaire candidates would have to campaign, would have to win genuine grassroots support, before they could become credible candidates.

Is there any reason anyone in this country could give that would justify the status quo, where the über-rich are automatically viewed as credible, because they can buy their way into the public consciousness?

Grover Norquist infamously said he wanted to shrink the size of government till it could be drowned in a bathtub. That is, remember, the American government, the revolutionary democratic republic set up by George Washinton, Thomas Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, and company. Not an enemy government, but the government that protects and serves the interests of a free, democratic people.

In 2001, George W. Bush faithfully carried out the first phase of that war on American democracy: following the extremist ideology which holds that all taxation is tyrannical theft —the American revolutionaries resisted taxation without representation, not taxation itself—, Bush looted the treasury and gave a projeced $1.7 trillion surplus to the riches of the rich.

The result of this was the demand for more money. In 2003, the cuts were expanded, and the federal government was plunged into a long-term debt crisis the likes of which it had never seen. With no surplus in good times, the government was then fiscally unprepared for the desperate needs of hard times, when the entire banking sector, and the countries biggest industrial corporations, were suddenly at risk of total collapse.

The Republican solution? Once again, to give unprecedented sums of taxpayer wealth to the richest of the rich. Between his tax cuts, his unfunded wars and the TARP bailout, George W. Bush oversaw the single most massive deliberate transfer of wealth in the history of humanity. And every time, it was free money for those who don’t need it.

Nevermind that this runs totally contrary to the Darwinian market theory the Republicans constantly profess to uphold: that private business is best able to fend for itself, more efficient than government, and knows better what to do with money. If there is a way to get hundreds of billions of dollars in free taxpayer money, we’ll take that too.

The hypocrisy is obvious, and shabby and should be recognized. But what is more important is the manner in which this whole transfer of wealth derailed the US economy. If we are honest, we can stop expressing surprise about the Great Recession, stop pretending the jobs recovery has been slower than expected, and stop pretending any of this has to do with Barack Obama.

The policies George W. Bush enacted were designed to undermine the American economy. Not designed with the explicit intent of ruining the American economy, but yes with the explicit intent of undermining the fundamental role reserved for the middle class, as the beating heart of our economy. And so, by extension, the economy had to come crashing down.

When the “supply side” of the economic equation —because this view of supply and demand is a nostalgic way to get back into the us vs. them feudal way of thinking so beloved by certain segments of the antidemocratic movement— is given money for nothing, history has consistently shown they will give nothing in return.

Why would they spend their money creating jobs for ordinary people, risking their holdings in real-world investments, when doing so is not a condition of getting the money and they can invest in wealth-to-wealth investment schemes? The pervasive financial deregulation that took place between 1998 and 2008, provided this opportunity: give your money to bankers who will invest in their own banking “instruments”, which will instantly inflate your wealth, so you can tell other bankers to give you more money.

With that formula firmly in place, it was possible to turn the entire financial system into a giant gambling den, in which investors were no longer looking at whether their investments were secure because they were creating real market value through real enterprises actually providing some good or service, and requiring human beings to work, and to be well paid for it.

Now, you could “make a market” unique to one single financial product, and that product could be a bundle of mortgages that will never appreciate in real value beyond a certain number, no matter how many times they are resold. No jobs were being created, unless the grand illusion that this was not fiction were to hold and the mysterious flow of unfounded capital were to new mega-enterprises, and no one notice.

But of course, it was more convenient to keep that kind of unfounded capital swirling around in a vortex of unfounded capital generating systems, also known as complex “financial instruments” based on “derivatives”, or investment products based oh other investment products, where the relationship in pricing need not make sense if subjected to common arithmetic.

More convenient, because in that universe, it was more difficult to show the house of cards for a house of cards. So the house of cards incentivized, indeed required, a shift away from investments that improve the real quality of the economic landscape, away from the generation of good, stable jobs that pay well, and better and better over time, and allow the middle class to accumulate wealth.

The middle class accumulating wealth was anathema to the engineers of the Bush-era ultra-Reaganomics —an upgraded, scorched-earth rendition of what George W.’s father called “voodoo economics—, because an expanding middle class would necessarily accumulate wealth and power that was supposed to go only to specific segments of the so-called supply side.

Between 2001 and 2008, median household incomes fell by $2,000, across the United States. That means Bush’s pro-wealth policies left most people significantly worse off. Tis was visible throughout his presidency, and led directly to the collapse of the housing boom, of consumer spending, and to the unprecedented rash of bankruptcies we have seen since late 2007.

And that has come with the Republicans’ careful re-engineering of bankruptcy law, which made it harder for individuals to escape deep, impossible-to-pay debt, and easier for corporations to do so. This could almost be viewed as a prudent intervention in economic policy, designed to make sure the financial system would not totally unravel in the coming, and foreseeable maelstrom of fiscal decay.

So Grover Norquist proposed radical tax cuts to put an end to the American revolution, and George W. Bush carried out the assault. And they did so by calling their actions patriotic, just as any extremist destroys the human aspirations of a revolution if given the chance—Napoleon, Mao, Castro, to name a few.

In 2010, the Republicans did what they’ve done so well since the birth of voodoo economics—they used economic hardship spawned by their own policies to persuade voters to turn on the Democrats. Blaming Obama and Pelosi for a protracted process of recovery —which in fact was moving along better than could be expected, considering the basic supports for economic prosperity had been demolished in the preceding 8 years and the crisis— and took control of the House, pledging to continue their dismantling of the American revolutionary system.

It’s important to take that view of things because the vibrant middle class is. An outgrowth of the logic of the American revolution, which dictated that the people should be more important than the powerful and real human liberty should be more important than the whims of the superrich. The Norquist-Bush assault on all things government is an assault on the principle that the government is really of the people, by the people and for the people.

The Norquist-Bush axis of nakedly ideological capitalism holds that government is for the supply side, which they define according to feudal prejudice: only the top 1% is really fit to lead, and so they must provide the levers of economic growth and prosperity, and they while benefit from them more than anyone else. Any schoolchild studying basic arithmetic can see that over time, that will concentrate wealth and undermine democracy, but they hold to the lie anyway.

In fact, among the first responses to the resulting shortfall in government revenues is the aggressive, even depraved, slashing of funds for public education. Why, after all, should children of the non-wealthy be educated if they cannot drive economic growth and prosperity? Again, the common logic is that of feudalism and aristocracy, not of democracy.

Now, good American patriots, who have sacrificed for their country and who believe firmly in their own virtue and sanctity, but who nevertheless support this economic wrecking machine, will tell you they have no intention of destroying American democracy, t hat they love it and are shocked by what has taken place. And that is probably true.

But one doesn’t have to be plotting the destruction of a democratic system rooted in a vibrant middle class and the right to universal education to participate in it. One only has to side with the logic of feudalism over the logic of democracy. One only has to view the aristocrat as more worthy and disparage the common folk who aspire to take on a share of his power.

Now, enter Paul Ryan. Paul Ryan is the budget-cutting zealot who is perfectly suited for the slash education funding segment of the process. He views “bloated” education budgets, Social Security and Medicare as evil socialist schemes that will corrupt and ultimately destroy purely capitalist democracy.

His policy proposals suggest he is one of two things: either a shockingly corrupt rainmaker for megaconglomerates, willing to sell out his country to enrich billionaires and multinationals, or a conservative confused by the logic of his own economic philosophy, who believes that by taking money away from the middle class, you can make the middle class stronger.

He now proposes drastic, even inhuman cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, public education, and all of the levers of government at give ordinary people a chance at some dignity in our intensely competitive society. And if we are charitable, we can say he does so because he misunderstands the nature of our system: it’s capitalism in service of democracy, not laissez-faire non-government in service of capitalist wealth hoarders.

Paul Ryan may not understand his role in this process but he clearly playing a defined and crucial role in the dismantling of the American middle class, and so of our democracy. We can rely on him not to see this and not to fight back when his own party proposes changes to the electoral map that take power from the voters and give it to his party or its backers.

But if he were the man of the people, the people’s accountant, as he wants us to believe, he might look into the long-term economic value of public sector investments. He has refused to do so, saying only that cuts are more constructive than investment, in fact promoting the patently absurd “cut-to-grow” policy meant to undermine any serious economist who points out that all of this was foreseeable, and was foreseen and is the direct result of flagrantly irresponsible and undemocratic economic policies.

Today, Juan Cole published an open letter to the political left, asking them to understand the humanitarian urgency of the situation in Libya, and to balance their desire for an end to war and foreign interventions against the need to protect human life and ensure that a viable democracy movement is not put down through massive slaughter of thousands or tens of thousands of civilians. Cole is right. Though military action is never the best of all possible outcomes, it is sometimes the only way to protect innocent human life against plans of deliberate mass murder.

The Jasmine Revolution, the spreading pro-democracy movement that has reached into the capitals of so many nations across North Africa and the Middle East, marks an historical moment entirely without precedent in the history of the region. Peaceful, pro-democracy movements telling dictatorial regimes they are no longer afraid and they will not accept any future that continues to fail to be democratic. Muammar Qadhafi has already inspired several regimes to follow his lead and use extreme, massive, lethal violence to put down this peaceful revolution.

In Libya, that scheme of slaughter has gone further than anywhere else. What happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989, and in Tehran in 2009, has been turned into an all-out ground and air war against civilians across the nation of Libya. Qadhafi openly explained, in multiple public speeches, that he would slaughter thousands in Benghazi. He already did so in multiple other rebel-controlled cities. It has only been with sustained coalition airstrikes, and the imposition of a no-fly zone, that the pro-democracy resistance has been able to drive Qadhafi’s forces out of Ajdabiya, Brega and Ras Lanuf.

The pro-democracy movement became a de fact armed rebellion, when large factions of the military defected and joined the resistance. Qadhafi made hysterical claims that he was fighting a perverse coalition of al Qaeda, Israel, the United States, Iran, and “drug addicts”. His son said they were at war with “terrorists and gangsters”.

On one after another occasion, Qadhafi’s government declared a “ceasefire”, in an apparent effort to cause the coalition air forces and the pro-democracy resistance to stand down, while his air and ground assault continued virtually unabated. Footage from international journalists able to gain access to Qadhafi’s front-line positions showed a continual barrage of hundreds, if not thousands, of heavy artillery shells being fired into rebel-held civilian areas.

Yesterday, a woman found her way to a gathering of press at a government-controlled hotel in Tripoli, and screamed and cried that she had been kidnapped by Qadhafi’s militia, held prisoner for two days, and violently raped by 15 men. Reporters scuffled with hotel employees and government agents who tried to silence her. A TV camera was destroyed, the woman was threatened by at least one hotel employee with a butter-knife, and Qadhafi’s forces then forcibly removed her to an unknown location.

The incident clearly amounts to a brutal physical assault by pro-Qadhafi forces on foreign journalists. The woman’s fate is now unknown. The Qadhafi regime is using all force possible to brutally subdue not only the pro-democracy movement itself, but support from the civilian population and the ability of foreign journalists to report facts from the conflict.

In the United States, and across Europe, there has been friction on both the progressive left and the conservative right, among factions that do or do not favor military intervention in Libya, for ideological, practical or political reasons. There has been an unfortunate split between people who feel human life and democracy matter more than ideological preference and partisan interest, clouding the landscape and raising questions about the commitment of the allied forces to helping promote justice in Libya.

It has to be said, no one, of any political persuasion, in the US, Europe or the Arabic-speaking world, views Qadhafi as a legitimate head of state. This means there is a moral blur and intellectual incoherence among those who seek to oppose a limited airborne intervention to limit Qadhafi’s ability to use force against his own people.

In the US, there has been a split on the right between those who have been pushing for swift military action and those who seek to oppose Obama, either for partisan reasons or in adherence to an absolute prioritization of budget cuts. On the left, there has been a split between those who vehemently oppose the so-called “imperial presidency” and those who prioritize the interest of the pro-democracy movement.

In both cases, there has been significant rhetorical confusion about what is happening, how to characterize it, and whether or not there is public support for military action. In the US, polling clearly shows support for Pres. Obama’s response to the Libyan crisis. The people of the United States believe Qadhafi needs to be stopped from slaughtering thousands of civilians in a quest to perpetuate a 42-year-long dictatorship.

The United States Congress will likely soon face the choice of whether or not to retro-actively authorize military force, perhaps for a sustained period, to assist in maintaining the no-fly zone. If NATO officially takes control of the mission, it may be unnecessary to secure a Congressional vote on assistance to NATO, but politicos right and left will be challenged to find coherent positions: do they favor limited action to prevent massive civilian death, or a world in which principled people stand by and watch the slaughter go forward, with the explicit intent of crushing the pro-democracy movement spreading across the Middle East?

The wishful defeatism that is cynically promoting the idea that we should not be involved in implementing the Libyan no-fly zone because it cannot succeed is a cynical attempt to undermine the success of the action, and little more. It depends almost entirely on the view that because we cannot guarantee the perfect democratic success of the people of Libya, in their aspirations for democratic freedom, they don’t deserve recognition or assistance.

This flies in the face of the entire historical political culture of the United States. Though seen as imperialist leanings in much of the rest of the world, the Monroe doctrine —that the US would defend democratic freedom anywhere it cropped up in the Americas— and the Truman doctrine —extending this principle to the entire world— resonated in the US because they echo the sentiment of the American people that the American revolution was 1) not ideological, 2) universal, and 3) a humanitarian and morally necessary action to which all people should have a right.

The aspirations of the Libyan people are the aspirations of people everywhere, to be free of the brutality and torment of a rapacious dictator who imposes his will through thuggish secret police, kidnap, torture and the use of naked military force against civilian populations. But perhaps more significantly, in this particular historical moment, these aspirations are linked to the fate of millions of people in at least a dozen countries, where non-violent protest movements are calling for change, and where even “moderate” regimes appear tempted to try their hand at violent suppression.

The international community failed to act to protect civilians in Rwanda, and nearly 1 million people were murdered in cold blood, in medieval fashion, in just 100 days. The international community has never intervened effectively in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and over the last 13 years, an estimated 6 million people, most of them civilians, have died. Darfur continues to live under threat of genocide and in the case of Libya, the international community has three things that warrant immediate action:

1. Qadhafi’s open declaration of an intent to use his military to slaughter thousands of civilians in Benghazi;
2. The invitation of the resistance movement in Libya, which has formed a transitional government;
3. The unanimous support of the Arab League and the UN Security Council for imposing a no-fly zone, using “all necessary measures” to protect civilian life.

To not act, with the historical imperatives, the moral imperatives, the democratic movement at risk, and these three factors, aligning with an international legal imperative to act, would be a morally bankrupt betrayal of our own fundamental principles as a free people that prize the value of individual human life over the whims of the powerful.

In a stunning insult to the American people and to the world community, the national Republican party has adopted a new propaganda attack against Pres. Obama: they now argue Pres. Obama is too talented at doing too many things and that the American people cannot comprehend such a complex job description.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, in his best known essay “Self Reliance”, that a “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” His meaning is two-fold: first, that to demand absolute consistency in the face of evidence of nuance is tragically foolish; second, that free people must be able to grasp and to handle complexity, or they will be less self-reliant, less able to govern their fate, less free.

Barack Obama definitively pulled ahead of John McCain in the 2008 presidential election contest when McCain foolishly said he was suspending his campaign to learn about the unfolding economic crisis. Obama reminded Americans the job of president required a person who could “walk and chew gum at the same time”, and that Sen. McCain had cst hundreds of votes on the relevant issues.

The moment provided in high contrast a rich insight into the governing philosophy of the two candidates: the question was no longer about the “3am phone call”, but about what kind of intellect is required to deal with multiple crises at once. The nation was very clearly in that situation, and Sen. McCain had all but declared his inability to even understand issues on which he had been voting, with real-world consequences.

Pres. Obama was elected by the most votes ever cast for any candidate, precisely because the American people believed he should be given the responsibility of dealing with the mind-boggling complexity of the job of president in a time of multiple converging, and possibly mounting, crises.

Pres. Obama has done more to steer the economy back to prosperity than any president since FDR, and the fact is: just to keep pace with population, the Great Recession has required massive new job creation. It is a genuine accomplishment that unemployment did not exceed 10% and is now steadily (if slowly) falling.

Pres. Obama is building new markets across the western hemisphere, to spur exports, investment and job creation, at home. These alliances are vital to the national interest, and Pres. Obama is able to govern at home, respond with material assistance to the unfolding Japanese quake, tsunami and nuclear disaster, and plan, authorize, and direct, the diplomatic and military efforts needed to impose a no-fly zone on Libya.

The president is talented enough to do this complex work. He is staffed and equipped to do it. And he was elected specifically because the American people understand the value of this kind of job performance and in fact demand it of their president.

On the question of clarity on Libya: every Republican who is raising this objection that “it’s not quite clear” what the objective of the military action in Libya is, absolutely must be a cynic willing to propagandize the American people, to undermine the military and diplomatic strategy of the president, the nation, and our allies.

The objective could not be more clear: Muammar Qadhafi threatened mass atrocities against an entire civilian population, and is thought to have already carried out such strikes, which he publicly stated he would in perverse moments of “outreach” to the very communities he was about to attack mercilessly; the UN Security Council voted unanimously to impose a no-fly zone on Libya, and authorized “all necessary measures” to protect civilians.

Five nations abstained, including China and Russia, who fundamentally oppose this type of military intervention. Those abstentions were, in effect, a deliberate choice to support the international effort to oppose Qadhafi.

The president has been clear he believes Qadhafi has lost the legitimacy required to govern and should leave power. He has also been working diligently and persistently, for two years, to build the United States’ credibility as a light in the world that supports the upholding of and abiding by the rule of law.

At present, there is no legal authority for any foreign power to intervene to remove Qadhafi or to depose his government. This is not confusion or lack of clarity. We have a president who understands the complex reality in which we have to operate; the Republicans seem not to, and seem convinced to persuade the American people to shut down their intellect, blind themselves to the complex environment of crises facing the world community and abandon a president who is actively and admirably dealing with all of those crises.

There is no reason for this nonsensical argument the Republican party’s propaganda machine is pushing, other than a nakedly partisan attempt to manipulate the political landscape. It is cynical, undemocratic and a sign of pervasive unwillingness to support the better interests of the American people, if in any way doing so might lend even minimal support to the man who won more votes than any candidate in American history.