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

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.

IndependentsOfPrinciple :: House Speaker John Boehner appears to be under attack from an intransigent House Republican caucus that will not allow him to retain any credible leadership if he agrees to a debt and deficit reduction plan that includes any tax increases of any kind. While select Republicans in the Senate agree with the deficit commission recommendations and the Gang of Six proposal—which recognizes the need to increase revenues to deal with escalating deficits—, radicals refuse to agree to any compromise.

It seems Speaker Boehner is being held hostage by a radical Tea Party revolt in his party, whom he is not prepared to anger. Part of the problem is rhetorical. On issues of debt, deficit, entitlements and security, routine use of hyperbole has so distorted debate, that much political discourse now distorts what is actually happening in policy. Republican Sen. Tom Coburn (OK) told Meet the Press, falsely, that “the government is twice as big as it was ten years ago; it’s thirty percent bigger than it was when Pres. Obama took office.”

What Coburn is speaking about is the federal budget, and nearly the entire amount of the increases he cites are security related—specifically the costs of funding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with increases in Pentagon spending. Pres. Obama added massive new numbers to the federal budget, without adding any new spending, simply by reporting, for the first time, the spending for Iraq and Afghanistan as part of the budget.

Such distorted rhetoric, treating cost as “the size of government”, leads many conservatives to the mistaken view that tax dollars are being foolishly wasted on unnecessary programs, new hires, and intrusions into personal freedom. In fact, there are fewer government employees now than when Pres. Obama took office; in fact, Democrats are proposing sweeping reforms designed to reduce long-term debt and deficits; in fact, it is failure to fund the government that is causing the deficit to expand.

Sen. Coburn also repeated on Meet the Press the right-wing myth that Pres. Obama has been “unwilling to deal with entitlements”. When Pres. Obama’s healthcare reform process called for saving $500 billion in Medicare fraud, waste and abuse,  over 10 years, Republicans ran vicious and false ads against him, claiming he was trying to “gut Medicare” and “cut benefits” for the elderly. In fact, it has been Pres. Obama who has repeatedly proposed targeted Medicare reform, designed to roll back costs without cutting benefits.

“Entitlements” is another keyword in the rhetorical distortion of Washington politics: entitlements are programs which some citizens are “entitled to” because they have funded them. By paying into Social Security and Medicare, or by virtue of one’s military service, one accumulates benefits that come later in life. There are many benefits to society of such a system, and the “entitlement” factor in the equation is really, and should be thought of as earned benefits.

Medicaid, unemployment benefits, food stamps, and SCHIP—which provides health insurance to underprivileged children—operate on a different logic. But, there is no way to eliminate spending on these without causing real and measurable harm to the overall economy. Even these “entitlement” programs are really designed to optimize the public cost of certain failures of the marketplace to optimize costs. Our public discourse on “entitlements” is almost entirely driven by a narrow ideological view that anyone receiving entitlements is a parasite.

In this climate, Speaker Boehner is trapped between the reason of the vast majority of people, who believe we cannot solve the mounting deficit crisis without addressing revenue shortfalls and the unreason of a radical Tea Party faction, a minority even of his own party, that will not support any increase in taxes, no matter the potentially virtuous impact on the nation’s economic fabric.

Last week, Boehner tried to move his position closer to a “grand bargain”, with Pres. Obama, who has sought to meet the demand of that reasoned majority; since Friday, he appears trapped behind a wall of intransigence, not of his own construction. Much of this may stem from the hardcore ideologically wishful mythologies that prevail in the use of rhetoric to deal with debt and deficit issues.

Doris Kearns Goodwin said, today, that people in the political center are often neglected by the heated political rhetoric that prevails in ideological debate. She noted that some have called for “raging centrists” who can represent the true voice of independents. Boehner has sought to be the skilled negotiator and the leader wise enough to recognize a good deal when he sees one, but it now appears his party will not allow him to lead in that way.

There are questions about whether the Boehner speakership is in jeopardy, whether his party will challenge his leadership, if he strays from their 2012 election strategy, which involves a programmatic refusal to cooperate with Pres. Obama. More radical Tea Partyists have adopted the irresponsible “blow it up” view, which holds that forcing default will ruin the government and allow them to rebuild it, according to their ideological preferences.

For the record, Tim Pawlenty proudly says he “did blow it up” when he was governor of Minnesota, leading to a debilitating government shutdown, the furlough of thousands of workers, negative impact to his state’s economy, and higher borrowing costs that could weigh on the state’s budget for years. Economists agree that default would be catastrophic, and would lead to higher borrowing costs, exacerbating the problem and doing serious long-term harm to the wider economy.

Andrea Mitchell said it is hard for her to understand how over 200 members of the House of Representatives swear an oath to refuse to raise taxes, before even evaluating the wisdom of specific policies on which negotiation will be necessary. Historically, being a good legislator means being able to make the deal that moves official policy in the direction of your agenda. Many, including Republicans, are now urging Speaker Boehner to abandon the Tea Party radicals and work with moderate Republicans and Democrats to stave off catastrophic default.

Meet the Press moderator David Gregory quoted Winston Churchill, who said “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing, after they’ve tried everything else.” Many political analysts believe we could do better, if there were more consideration given to non-ideological positions, which may actually represent the views of most Americans, regardless of their partisan voting habits.

Independent voters are often credited with leading the debate from the political center, but have been boxed out of all talk on debt and deficit, with ideological distortions applied to polling numbers to obscure their views. The debt-ceiling negotiations have thrown into high contrast the implied obligation that House Speaker Boeher join Pres. Obama and Senate Leader Reid as three principled centrists negotiating, as Boehner today told Chris Wallace, to do “what’s right for the country,” regardless of party preferences.

ABC News political correspondent Jonathan Karl today tweeted: “Boehner will face a revolt of his own leadership for grand bargain that increases revenue by 800B. Am told Cantor&McCarthy are opposed.” Mr. Boehner finds himself pressed by history to be a principled centrist, but standing alone between reason and unreason, and under attack from his own party. He may even be facing the threat of a challenge from Eric Cantor (R-VA), who has used the debt debate to reposition himself as an ally of the Tea Party.

Speaker Boehner did, however, say today that he did not come to Washington to “be a Congressman”, but to “do what is right for the country.” And he may now have to choose between the two. The question is, ultimately, whether the American people can find a way to expand the space for the voice of reason, and reward principled moderates who make political sacrifices in service to “what is good for the country”.

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.

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.

Republican governors have unabashedly joined in their party’s national campaign to undermine the economic recovery and marginalize their people in a concerted effort to harm Pres. Obama and derail his re-election bid. In Florida, the new Tea Partyist governor has refused to accept any federal funding for a high-speed rail project that would have stimulated economic growth and job creation in his state, despite Florida being granted $2.4 billion out of the $2.6 billion needed, and the previous governor having explicitly requested the funds.

Florida may still get a chance to use that $2.4 billion in funding, and to build its high-speed rail system, without the governor having any say in the matter, but the cities who have agreed to back the project will have to join together to bid for the $2.4 billion, which is now open to any state that is planning high-speed rail construction. Ultimately, it will cost more to build the rail project, because of Gov. Scott’s actions, than it would have under Pres. Obama’s recovery plan.

This is just the latest in a long string of such episodes, where idea-starved extremist Republicans try to impress a rudderless Tea Party fringe by defiantly refusing to be part of anything at all, no matter how beneficial, no matter how trivial, that might make Pres. Obama look good. High speed rail is part of the president’s recovery legislation, and would stimulate economic growth, outside investment and job creation, along 10 different corridors across the country, but Republican governors have sworn to one another an oath of allegiance that now bars their constituents from having access to that better, freer, more prosperous future.

Instead, Republican governors and Republicans in Congress have consistently sought to promote policies that will undermine job creation, stimulate waves of layoffs, deprive working people of basic rights and already paid-for benefits, and force people out of their homes. The Republicans in the House of Representatives are now seeking to eliminate all funding for the four key programs Pres. Obama is using to help deliver relieve to homeowners facing foreclosure.

FOX News gleefully celebrated the move with the headline “Republican Seek to Kill Obama’s Housing Relief Programs“. The proposal specifically aims at using the money they would take away from families about to have their homes seized to “pay down the debt”. This is another way of saying the Republicans plan to fund their never-ending mega-taxcuts for the wealthy, by taking money away from taxpayers and the families in need of relief.

In Wisconsin, Michigan, New Jersey, Indiana, Ohio and elsewhere, Republican governors with a venomous view of public service are engaged in a political strategy designed to strip power away from ordinary people, working families and the middle class, and hand it to corporate backers, out of state front groups and the Republican party itself. In Wisconsin, ads run by Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS (a.k.a. “the secret billionaires club”) and the words of the Republican leader of the state Senate himself have revealed the plot to deny public servants their collective bargaining rights is a political attack on Pres. Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign.

The governor of Michigan, in a move deeply shocking to many, is trying to force through the legislature a bill that would establish emergency rule, literally. Gov. Snyder is seeking emergency powers that would enable him to 1) unilaterally declare a “financial emergency”, 2) disincorporate entire municipal governments, 3) dismiss elected officials with no replacement election to follow, 4) seize control of local civil services, 5) hand taxpayer money, services and POWERS to private, for-profit firms.

Bobby Jindal, in Louisiana, not only has refused funding for housing relief and urban development, and for high-speed rail, he repeatedly sought to undermine the federal government’s access to information about what was taking place locally with regard to the BP spill, sued to stop what would have been an effective measure of oil containment, and imposed on his state a quixotic, scientifically unfounded and now failed “sand berm” barrier against oil infiltration.

The result: the Louisiana coastline has seen oil infiltration (crude oil seeps easily through sand) on a massive scale, and fragile coastal ecosystems have been devastated, both by the failure of the berm project and by the berms themselves, which have impeded marshland ecosystems’ ability to derive needed nutrients from contact with the Gulf of Mexico.

No serious observer can come to any other view than that Bobby Jindal has deliberately engaged in a systematic, political assault on the welfare of the people of his state, in order to hurt the Democratic president, undermine Democratic moderates who are popular in his state, and promote the Republican agenda of shrinking the public sector until it is more or less owned by the wealth backers pushing these ideas on people of mind and character weak enough to be part of this, like Gov. Jindal appears to be.

But that’s almost beside the point. The real problem facing the people of Louisiana, or Wisconsin, or Michigan or Florida, or anywhere these deranged policies are being implemented —deranged because killing job-creation in the middle of a catastrophic nationwide job collapse, specifically resulting from the policies one’s own party has promoted for decades, is not the work of right minds— is whether they will be given an opportunity to debate any of this in the public space.

In Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio and New Jersey, to name a few of the affected states, citizens not enamored of this particular fringe ideology, which is overtaking the whole of the national Republican party, are facing a very serious and very direct erosion of their ability to get their point of view into the public space. While corporate front groups have been granted the right to use unlimited, secret funds from donors with a specific for-profit interest in the outcome of elections, citizens groups, public media, labor unions and other non-GOP groups are literally under legal and legislative attack.

One after another state is now plotting to make poor people pay to vote, imposing a de facto poll tax by requiring all voters to carry a specific form of ID, which for many Democratic-leaning demographics will mean an additional expenditure and a hurdle to casting their vote. In Texas, Gov. Perry’s use of this tactic to manipulate the outcome of elections is so flagrant and egregious, the Republicans there included two waivers: senior citizens and people who hold concealed-carry gun permits. (For those of you not in the know, these are the two demographics with the most consistent and extreme pro-Republican voting record.)e

The Republican attack on ACORN was not an attack on “wasteful spending” or on a “political slush fund”; it was a coordinated, national, partisan assault on a non-profit umbrella organization that helped community groups doing charitable work get the visibility and the funding they needed to operate. And the logic of the attack was clear: ACORN was very good at registering poor, minority, young and first-time voters, all groups that tend to prefer Democratic candidates.

Republicans are unashamed of this campaign to harm groups, individuals and communities that stand up for ordinary people. Their assault on ACORN resulted in comprehensive “defunding” of the national organization, and has emboldened them to speak openly about their plans to drain funding from any organization, including ordinary citizens, that might not favor Republican party rule.

In New Hampshire, the Republican speaker of the state House actually explained on camera that their new voter ID plan was needed in order to counter the tendency of young voters to vote for liberal candidates.

In 2001, the House Republican majority, in connection with White House political director Karl Rove, declared its explicit intent to alter the landscape of American politics, through law, and through electoral engineering, to establish a “permanent Republican majority”, literally planning to establish permanent one-party rule in the United States, with all dissent forbidden either by diktat or by common practice.

In Texas, then national House majority leader Tom DeLay used his political fundraising and national influence to force the Republican-controlled legislature into an illegal redistricting of Congressional districts, to make it easier for Republicans to keep control of the House of Representatives. The move was illegal because redistricting occurs once every decade, based on new census figures, and it had already happened.

DeLay has now been convicted of money laundering and other corrupt activities relating to his misuse of funds. He infamously placed a call to Homeland Security, asking that fighter jets be scrambled to chase down Democratic legislators fleeing the state to deprive Republicans of a quorum needed to pass their redistricting plan.

What is now taking place is the flagrant politicization of all aspects of public service and public policy. In other words, one of the two major parties has adopted, as a national organization, in apparent coordination with extremely wealthy offshoots and non-party groups, the policy that every single act of any one of its members in public office should be directed toward manipulating the landscape of policy, economics, and elections, to benefit the party.

This is a nakedly transparent policy, and has been openly discussed by leading Republicans, from Sen. Mitch McConnell —who declared his intent to devote every aspect of his party’s action in the Senate to destroying Pres. Obama— to Rep. Michelle Bachmann, one of the most incendiary and ill-informed public servants in the country, who spoke of the need to “repeal Obama”, to even more radical figures who have spoken about “Second Amendment remedies” to the tragedy of any election not going to Republicans.

The American people need to stand up for common sense, stand up for common decency, stand up for the universal demand that NO PUBLIC SERVANT EVER USE THEIR OFFICE FOR PERSONAL OR PARTISAN GAIN, stand up for clarity and unity of purpose as a precondition of service in elective office. The American people need to demand that the Republican party correct its course, abandon this campaign to distort our political map to serve the interest of its wealthy backers, and demand an enforceable ethics pledge of every Republican candidate for office that he or she will never use any public office to manipulate the landscape for partisan or personal gain.

Conservation activist Tim DeChristopher was found guilty this week of disrupting public business and causing “financial harm” to the government and to private interests, for interfering with a public land auction later found to be inappropriately staged.

DeChristopher told the crowd of supporters gathered at the courthouse that “the sharpest rock on the wildest shore can never break that ocean apart, they can never wear that ocean down, because it’s the ocean that shapes the shore.”

The following is a transcript of the speech he gave after hearing that he had been found guilty…

What the world wanted to see was how you would react. And you have reacted with joy and resolve. You’ve shown that your power will not be intimidated by any power that they have, and that’s the most important thing that’s happened here this week.

Because everything that happened inside that building tried to convince me that I was alone and that I was weak. They tried to convince me that I was like a little finger out there on my own that could easily be broken. And all of you out here were the reminder for all of us that I wasn’t just a finger all alone in there, but that I was connected to hand with many fingers that could be united together as one fist, and that that fist could not be broken by the power that they have in there.

That fist is not a symbol of violence. That fist is a symbol that we will not be mislead into thinking that we are alone. We will not be lied to and told that we are weak. We will not be divided and we will not back down. That fist is a symbol that we are connected and that we are powerful. It’s a symbol that we hold true to our vision of a healthy and just world and that we are building the self empowering movement to make it happen. All those authorities in there wanted me to think like a finger but are children are calling to us to think like a fist.

And we know that now I’ll have to go prison, we know that now that is the reality. But that’s just the job that I have to do. That’s the role that I face. Many before me have gone to jail for justice and if we are going to achieve our vision many after me will have to join me as well.

No one ever told us that this battle would be easy. No one ever told us that we wouldn’t have to make sacrifices. We knew that when we started this fight.

Every wave on the ocean that has ever risen up and refused to lay back down has been dashed on the shore, but it is the very purpose of a wave to rise up, because once it rises up above the horizon it finally has the perspective to see that it’s not just a wave, that it’s a part of a mighty ocean. And the sharpest rock on the wildest shore can never break that ocean apart, they can never wear that ocean down, because it’s the ocean that shapes the shore.

That’s what we’re starting to do here today. That’s what we’re starting to do here this week. With wave after wave after wave crashing against that shore, we shape it to our vision. Thank you all for being a part of that.

(End transcript.)

Robert Redford has written about the verdict:

Part of the statement issued this afternoon by U.S. Atty. Carlie Christensen praising the guilty verdict, alluded to DeChristopher’s actions… “disrupting open public processes and causing financial harm to the government and other individuals.” Really?

There’s something wrong with this picture. Major financial institutions in this country brought the nation’s economy to its knees yet not one person associated with the debacle is in jail. The human consequence of their actions is indescribably profound and not one person responsible for any of it went to jail. And yet the federal government prosecuted this young activist’s act of civil disobedience and he now faces jail time.

Every day, oil, gas, mining and other energy and extractive industries are indiscriminately polluting our air, land and water as the new U.S. Congress works diligently to take away the power of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to regulate their actions and protect the well-being of the nation’s people. There’s something wrong with this picture.

And when you consider that weeks after DeChristopher bid on his 13 parcels, a federal judge in essence agreed with him and blocked the sale of all the parcels, DeChristopher’s prosecution becomes even more troubling. Add to that the fact that the Obama Administration’s Dept of Interior said the overall sale was improper and pulled all the parcels from auction and DeChristopher’s prosecution borders on absurd.

Redford  is only one of many prominent voices who have expressed support for DeChristopher.

More information about the trial, the legal complications of the auction itself and the protest bid by Mr. DeChristopher, as well as ways to contribute to his defense fund, can be found at www.Bidder70.org.

Thousands of Egyptian protesters are holding Tahrir Square, which has repeatedly been closed by security forces. Reports from Cairo suggest embattled Pres. Hosni Mubarak is moving to reassert control over major sections of the capital, but has yet to order an offensive against protesters in the main square. Mubarak told the nation he has asked his new prime minister to engage in dialogue with the opposition to promote democratic reform in Egypt.

Ranyah Sabry reports from Tahrir Square, for BBC radio. Mubarak’s order for a process to institute political and economic reform appears aimed at quelling the uprising and allowing his regime to remain in power. He has ordered the military to secure the major cities, and the military is now reported to be installing more heavily armed checkpoints around Cairo.

Police have returned to the streets, and protesters are said to be wary of their presence, as it is the police that are widely feared and reviled by a population that alleges rampant police brutality, arbitrary detention and abuse. Al Masry Al Youm reports in its English edition that protesters have given the army until Thursday to choose sides. In a statement outlining plans for a march on the presidential palace, for Friday, they declared:

We the people and the youth of Egypt demand that our brothers in the national armed forces clearly define their stance by either lining up with the real legitimacy provided by millions of Egyptians on strike on the streets, or standing in the camp of the regime that has killed our people, terrorized them and stole from them.

Throughout the protests, demonstrators have reportedly treated the army as an ally, and have openly embraced members of the military, either a sign of popular trust and respect or a sophisticated and organized courtship of the nation’s ultimate power brokers. In an online poll, the same publication has found that 94% of respondents (as of this writing) believe the Mubarak regime’s response to the protests has not been “satisfactory”.

Overnight, the US government of Pres. Barack Obama has reportedly been engaging heads of state around the world, to discuss support for a peaceful transfer of power, and has begun to talk openly of the need for an organized process to peacefully transfer power to a government that represents the needs and aspirations of the Egyptian people.

According to CNN, “Activists in Cairo and Alexandria said they were organizing ‘million-man’ marches in the cities for Tuesday — a week after anti-government protests began,” and helicopters were hovering over central Cairo, monitoring events on the ground. The US is planning special charter flights to evacuate Americans living in Egypt who want to leave.

The 7th day of protests in Egypt appears to be marking a new phase in the uprising. As demonstrators have been able to show that 1) the movement is spreading to more segments of the population and 2) it is not retreating, this week a series of massive new demonstrations are planned with the specific agenda of winning the army’s support and ousting Pres. Hosni Mubarak, by week’s end.

UPDATE, 8:37 am EST: The Khaleej Times has published a comment from a Cairo University student sympathetic to the protest movement, who mourns the chaos and disorder that has befallen her country. She explains that the movement had specifically “four demands including the stepping down of Hosni Mubarak, the resignation of the cabinet led by Prime Minister Ahmed Mahmoud Mohamed Nazef, dissolving the People’s Assembly and rescheduling elections, and establishing a new government supported by the people”.

She echoes the concern of so many Egyptians both inside the country and living abroad, that the safety of friends and loved ones may be in jeopardy since the violent unrest sparked by police killing of demonstrators on Friday, and the collapse of law and order across the country. She goes on to make an impassioned plea for civic cooperation and a devotion to avoid falling into the “frenzy” and “madness” of the “mob mentality”:

My beautiful country is at a standstill. I believe in other cities the story is the same. It is again like a tinderbox, with very dry powder, anything can ignite anger at this moment because people are feeling insecure, no one seems to be in charge. If the unruly elements take over the whole point of the demonstration will be lost. We are not on the roads to destroy property or burn buses or rob homes, that is not the Egyptian method, we want justice and a new system of government where people are accountable. Do not give us chaos when we want commitment, do not give us criminals when we want confidence. We have shown patience, great patience, men, women, the young, and we want to be heard from the heart.

Over the weekend, there were reports the Mubarak regime might be instigating violence, looting and chaos, in order to spark calls for the imposing of strict new controls on freedom of movement and freedom of expression. This student’s call for order is not a call to halt the protests, but a call to return to the 4-point agenda the movement so carefully set forth, and to collaborate as citizens in the shaping of a new future for Egypt and her people.

UPDATE, 8:45 am EST: Reports from central Cairo say the military is now controlling Midan Tahrir (Tahrir Square, or Liberation Square), building “blast walls” and barricades and setting up check points bristling with weapons and armored vehicles. Protesters are being checked and/or searched, but are being allowed to enter the square.

The mood in Tahrir Square in the morning was described as tense, as enthusiasm for the uprising appears to spread, but with fears the police and/or military may be planning a major crackdown. Internet access is still restricted across the country, and movement organizers are calling for a “million man march” in central Cairo on Tuesday, to be the 8th day of the protests.

UPDATE, 9:21 am EST: The BBC’s Lyce Doucet described on World Service radio the scene in Tahrir Square being more organized by the day. She said the scene was “extraordinary” Monday, as huge crowds were “streaming” over the bridge to cross the Nile and enter the square. She described men and women, holding small children by the hand, joining in a show of citizenship and wanting to take part in history.

Doucet also described an encounter with a group of people leaving Tahrir Square, who said they were “on the morning shift”, and that the protest is now being organized to allow the maximum number of people to cycle through and allow supporters to rest and to return. Pamphlets are reportedly being handed out urging the military to take sides and to stand with the people against Mubarak.

More from Cafe Sentido:

• Students Stage Pro-democracy Demonstrations in Sudan
• Egypt Updates: ‘Basic Collapse of Law & Order’, Anger at Mubarak
• Egypt Update: Military Appears to Protect Demonstrators (video)
• Egypt Updates: Worldwide Protests Join Demonstrators’ Call for Mubarak to Go
• Egypt Updates: Uprising Intensifies, Mubarak to Dismiss Government
• Pro-democracy Protests Spread to Jordan
• Pro-democracy Protests Spread Across Arabic-speaking World
• Tens of Thousands Protest Authoritarian Rule in Egypt
• Tunisian Regime Toppled by Street Protests
• Internet Access Must Be a Human Right
• ‘A New Beginning’: Obama’s Cairo Speech (video + transcript)

The following is an official White House transcript of Pres. Obama’s 2011 State of the Union address, as prepared for delivery in the well of the House of Representatives, 25 January 2011:

Mr. Speaker, Mr. Vice President, Members of Congress, distinguished guests, and fellow Americans:

Tonight I want to begin by congratulating the men and women of the 112th Congress, as well as your new Speaker, John Boehner. And as we mark this occasion, we are also mindful of the empty chair in this Chamber, and pray for the health of our colleague — and our friend — Gabby Giffords.

It’s no secret that those of us here tonight have had our differences over the last two years. The debates have been contentious; we have fought fiercely for our beliefs. And that’s a good thing. That’s what a robust democracy demands. That’s what helps set us apart as a nation.

But there’s a reason the tragedy in Tucson gave us pause. Amid all the noise and passions and rancor of our public debate, Tucson reminded us that no matter who we are or where we come from, each of us is a part of something greater — something more consequential than party or political preference.

We are part of the American family. We believe that in a country where every race and faith and point of view can be found, we are still bound together as one people; that we share common hopes and a common creed; that the dreams of a little girl in Tucson are not so different than those of our own children, and that they all deserve the chance to be fulfilled.

That, too, is what sets us apart as a nation.

Now, by itself, this simple recognition won’t usher in a new era of cooperation. What comes of this moment is up to us. What comes of this moment will be determined not by whether we can sit together tonight, but whether we can work together tomorrow.

I believe we can. I believe we must. That’s what the people who sent us here expect of us. With their votes, they’ve determined that governing will now be a shared responsibility between parties. New laws will only pass with support from Democrats and Republicans. We will move forward together, or not at all — for the challenges we face are bigger than party, and bigger than politics.

At stake right now is not who wins the next election — after all, we just had an election. At stake is whether new jobs and industries take root in this country, or somewhere else. It’s whether the hard work and industry of our people is rewarded. It’s whether we sustain the leadership that has made America not just a place on a map, but a light to the world.

We are poised for progress. Two years after the worst recession most of us have ever known, the stock market has come roaring back. Corporate profits are up. The economy is growing again.

But we have never measured progress by these yardsticks alone. We measure progress by the success of our people. By the jobs they can find and the quality of life those jobs offer. By the prospects of a small business owner who dreams of turning a good idea into a thriving enterprise. By the opportunities for a better life that we pass on to our children.

That’s the project the American people want us to work on. Together.

We did that in December. Thanks to the tax cuts we passed, Americans’ paychecks are a little bigger today. Every business can write off the full cost of the new investments they make this year. These steps, taken by Democrats and Republicans, will grow the economy and add to the more than one million private sector jobs created last year.

But we have more work to do. The steps we’ve taken over the last two years may have broken the back of this recession — but to win the future, we’ll need to take on challenges that have been decades in the making.

Many people watching tonight can probably remember a time when finding a good job meant showing up at a nearby factory or a business downtown. You didn’t always need a degree, and your competition was pretty much limited to your neighbors. If you worked hard, chances are you’d have a job for life, with a decent paycheck, good benefits, and the occasional promotion. Maybe you’d even have the pride of seeing your kids work at the same company.

That world has changed. And for many, the change has been painful. I’ve seen it in the shuttered windows of once booming factories, and the vacant storefronts of once busy Main Streets. I’ve heard it in the frustrations of Americans who’ve seen their paychecks dwindle or their jobs disappear — proud men and women who feel like the rules have been changed in the middle of the game.

They’re right. The rules have changed. In a single generation, revolutions in technology have transformed the way we live, work and do business. Steel mills that once needed 1,000 workers can now do the same work with 100. Today, just about any company can set up shop, hire workers, and sell their products wherever there’s an internet connection.

Meanwhile, nations like China and India realized that with some changes of their own, they could compete in this new world. And so they started educating their children earlier and longer, with greater emphasis on math and science. They’re investing in research and new technologies. Just recently, China became home to the world’s largest private solar research facility, and the world’s fastest computer.

So yes, the world has changed. The competition for jobs is real. But this shouldn’t discourage us. It should challenge us. Remember — for all the hits we’ve taken these last few years, for all the naysayers predicting our decline, America still has the largest, most prosperous economy in the world. No workers are more productive than ours. No country has more successful companies, or grants more patents to inventors and entrepreneurs. We are home to the world’s best colleges and universities, where more students come to study than any other place on Earth.

What’s more, we are the first nation to be founded for the sake of an idea — the idea that each of us deserves the chance to shape our own destiny. That is why centuries of pioneers and immigrants have risked everything to come here. It’s why our students don’t just memorize equations, but answer questions like “What do you think of that idea? What would you change about the world? What do you want to be when you grow up?”

The future is ours to win. But to get there, we can’t just stand still. As Robert Kennedy told us, “The future is not a gift. It is an achievement.” Sustaining the American Dream has never been about standing pat. It has required each generation to sacrifice, and struggle, and meet the demands of a new age.

Now it’s our turn. We know what it takes to compete for the jobs and industries of our time. We need to out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world. We have to make America the best place on Earth to do business. We need to take responsibility for our deficit, and reform our government. That’s how our people will prosper. That’s how we’ll win the future. And tonight, I’d like to talk about how we get there.

The first step in winning the future is encouraging American innovation.

None of us can predict with certainty what the next big industry will be, or where the new jobs will come from. Thirty years ago, we couldn’t know that something called the Internet would lead to an economic revolution. What we can do — what America does better than anyone — is spark the creativity and imagination of our people. We are the nation that put cars in driveways and computers in offices; the nation of Edison and the Wright brothers; of Google and Facebook. In America, innovation doesn’t just change our lives. It’s how we make a living.

Our free enterprise system is what drives innovation. But because it’s not always profitable for companies to invest in basic research, throughout history our government has provided cutting-edge scientists and inventors with the support that they need. That’s what planted the seeds for the Internet. That’s what helped make possible things like computer chips and GPS.

Just think of all the good jobs — from manufacturing to retail — that have come from those breakthroughs.

Half a century ago, when the Soviets beat us into space with the launch of a satellite called Sputnik, we had no idea how we’d beat them to the moon. The science wasn’t there yet. NASA didn’t even exist. But after investing in better research and education, we didn’t just surpass the Soviets; we unleashed a wave of innovation that created new industries and millions of new jobs.

This is our generation’s Sputnik moment. Two years ago, I said that we needed to reach a level of research and development we haven’t seen since the height of the Space Race. In a few weeks, I will be sending a budget to Congress that helps us meet that goal. We’ll invest in biomedical research, information technology, and especially clean energy technology — an investment that will strengthen our security, protect our planet, and create countless new jobs for our people.

Already, we are seeing the promise of renewable energy. Robert and Gary Allen are brothers who run a small Michigan roofing company. After September 11th, they volunteered their best roofers to help repair the Pentagon. But half of their factory went unused, and the recession hit them hard.

Today, with the help of a government loan, that empty space is being used to manufacture solar shingles that are being sold all across the country. In Robert’s words, “We reinvented ourselves.”

That’s what Americans have done for over two hundred years: reinvented ourselves. And to spur on more success stories like the Allen Brothers, we’ve begun to reinvent our energy policy. We’re not just handing out money. We’re issuing a challenge. We’re telling America’s scientists and engineers that if they assemble teams of the best minds in their fields, and focus on the hardest problems in clean energy, we’ll fund the Apollo Projects of our time.

At the California Institute of Technology, they’re developing a way to turn sunlight and water into fuel for our cars. At Oak Ridge National Laboratory, they’re using supercomputers to get a lot more power out of our nuclear facilities. With more research and incentives, we can break our dependence on oil with biofuels, and become the first country to have 1 million electric vehicles on the road by 2015.

We need to get behind this innovation. And to help pay for it, I’m asking Congress to eliminate the billions in taxpayer dollars we currently give to oil companies. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but they’re doing just fine on their own. So instead of subsidizing yesterday’s energy, let’s invest in tomorrow’s.

Now, clean energy breakthroughs will only translate into clean energy jobs if businesses know there will be a market for what they’re selling. So tonight, I challenge you to join me in setting a new goal: by 2035, 80% of America’s electricity will come from clean energy sources. Some folks want wind and solar. Others want nuclear, clean coal, and natural gas. To meet this goal, we will need them all — and I urge Democrats and Republicans to work together to make it happen.

Maintaining our leadership in research and technology is crucial to America’s success. But if we want to win the future — if we want innovation to produce jobs in America and not overseas — then we also have to win the race to educate our kids.

Think about it. Over the next ten years, nearly half of all new jobs will require education that goes beyond a high school degree. And yet, as many as a quarter of our students aren’t even finishing high school. The quality of our math and science education lags behind many other nations. America has fallen to 9th in the proportion of young people with a college degree. And so the question is whether all of us — as citizens, and as parents — are willing to do what’s necessary to give every child a chance to succeed.

That responsibility begins not in our classrooms, but in our homes and communities. It’s family that first instills the love of learning in a child. Only parents can make sure the TV is turned off and homework gets done. We need to teach our kids that it’s not just the winner of the Super Bowl who deserves to be celebrated, but the winner of the science fair; that success is not a function of fame or PR, but of hard work and discipline.

Our schools share this responsibility. When a child walks into a classroom, it should be a place of high expectations and high performance. But too many schools don’t meet this test. That’s why instead of just pouring money into a system that’s not working, we launched a competition called Race to the Top. To all fifty states, we said, “If you show us the most innovative plans to improve teacher quality and student achievement, we’ll show you the money.”

Race to the Top is the most meaningful reform of our public schools in a generation. For less than one percent of what we spend on education each year, it has led over 40 states to raise their standards for teaching and learning. These standards were developed, not by Washington, but by Republican and Democratic governors throughout the country. And Race to the Top should be the approach we follow this year as we replace No Child Left Behind with a law that is more flexible and focused on what’s best for our kids.

You see, we know what’s possible for our children when reform isn’t just a top-down mandate, but the work of local teachers and principals; school boards and communities.

Take a school like Bruce Randolph in Denver. Three years ago, it was rated one of the worst schools in Colorado; located on turf between two rival gangs. But last May, 97% of the seniors received their diploma. Most will be the first in their family to go to college. And after the first year of the school’s transformation, the principal who made it possible wiped away tears when a student said “Thank you, Mrs. Waters, for showing … that we are smart and we can make it.”

Let’s also remember that after parents, the biggest impact on a child’s success comes from the man or woman at the front of the classroom. In South Korea, teachers are known as “nation builders.” Here in America, it’s time we treated the people who educate our children with the same level of respect. We want to reward good teachers and stop making excuses for bad ones. And over the next ten years, with so many Baby Boomers retiring from our classrooms, we want to prepare 100,000 new teachers in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math.

In fact, to every young person listening tonight who’s contemplating their career choice: If you want to make a difference in the life of our nation; if you want to make a difference in the life of a child — become a teacher. Your country needs you.

Of course, the education race doesn’t end with a high school diploma. To compete, higher education must be within reach of every American. That’s why we’ve ended the unwarranted taxpayer subsidies that went to banks, and used the savings to make college affordable for millions of students. And this year, I ask Congress to go further, and make permanent our tuition tax credit — worth $10,000 for four years of college.

Because people need to be able to train for new jobs and careers in today’s fast-changing economy, we are also revitalizing America’s community colleges. Last month, I saw the promise of these schools at Forsyth Tech in North Carolina. Many of the students there used to work in the surrounding factories that have since left town. One mother of two, a woman named Kathy Proctor, had worked in the furniture industry since she was 18 years old. And she told me she’s earning her degree in biotechnology now, at 55 years old, not just because the furniture jobs are gone, but because she wants to inspire her children to pursue their dreams too. As Kathy said, “I hope it tells them to never give up.”

If we take these steps — if we raise expectations for every child, and give them the best possible chance at an education, from the day they’re born until the last job they take — we will reach the goal I set two years ago: by the end of the decade, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.

One last point about education. Today, there are hundreds of thousands of students excelling in our schools who are not American citizens. Some are the children of undocumented workers, who had nothing to do with the actions of their parents. They grew up as Americans and pledge allegiance to our flag, and yet live every day with the threat of deportation. Others come here from abroad to study in our colleges and universities. But as soon as they obtain advanced degrees, we send them back home to compete against us. It makes no sense.

Now, I strongly believe that we should take on, once and for all, the issue of illegal immigration. I am prepared to work with Republicans and Democrats to protect our borders, enforce our laws and address the millions of undocumented workers who are now living in the shadows. I know that debate will be difficult and take time. But tonight, let’s agree to make that effort. And let’s stop expelling talented, responsible young people who can staff our research labs, start new businesses, and further enrich this nation.

The third step in winning the future is rebuilding America. To attract new businesses to our shores, we need the fastest, most reliable ways to move people, goods, and information — from high-speed rail to high-speed internet.

Our infrastructure used to be the best — but our lead has slipped. South Korean homes now have greater internet access than we do. Countries in Europe and Russia invest more in their roads and railways than we do. China is building faster trains and newer airports. Meanwhile, when our own engineers graded our nation’s infrastructure, they gave us a “D.”

We have to do better. America is the nation that built the transcontinental railroad, brought electricity to rural communities, and constructed the interstate highway system. The jobs created by these projects didn’t just come from laying down tracks or pavement. They came from businesses that opened near a town’s new train station or the new off-ramp.

Over the last two years, we have begun rebuilding for the 21st century, a project that has meant thousands of good jobs for the hard-hit construction industry. Tonight, I’m proposing that we redouble these efforts.

We will put more Americans to work repairing crumbling roads and bridges. We will make sure this is fully paid for, attract private investment, and pick projects based on what’s best for the economy, not politicians.

Within 25 years, our goal is to give 80% of Americans access to high-speed rail, which could allow you go places in half the time it takes to travel by car. For some trips, it will be faster than flying — without the pat-down. As we speak, routes in California and the Midwest are already underway.

Within the next five years, we will make it possible for business to deploy the next generation of high-speed wireless coverage to 98% of all Americans. This isn’t just about a faster internet and fewer dropped calls. It’s about connecting every part of America to the digital age. It’s about a rural community in Iowa or Alabama where farmers and small business owners will be able to sell their products all over the world. It’s about a firefighter who can download the design of a burning building onto a handheld device; a student who can take classes with a digital textbook; or a patient who can have face-to-face video chats with her doctor.

All these investments — in innovation, education, and infrastructure — will make America a better place to do business and create jobs. But to help our companies compete, we also have to knock down barriers that stand in the way of their success.

Over the years, a parade of lobbyists has rigged the tax code to benefit particular companies and industries. Those with accountants or lawyers to work the system can end up paying no taxes at all. But all the rest are hit with one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world. It makes no sense, and it has to change.

So tonight, I’m asking Democrats and Republicans to simplify the system. Get rid of the loopholes. Level the playing field. And use the savings to lower the corporate tax rate for the first time in 25 years — without adding to our deficit.

To help businesses sell more products abroad, we set a goal of doubling our exports by 2014 — because the more we export, the more jobs we create at home. Already, our exports are up. Recently, we signed agreements with India and China that will support more than 250,000 jobs in the United States. And last month, we finalized a trade agreement with South Korea that will support at least 70,000 American jobs. This agreement has unprecedented support from business and labor; Democrats and Republicans, and I ask this Congress to pass it as soon as possible.

Before I took office, I made it clear that we would enforce our trade agreements, and that I would only sign deals that keep faith with American workers, and promote American jobs. That’s what we did with Korea, and that’s what I intend to do as we pursue agreements with Panama and Colombia, and continue our Asia Pacific and global trade talks.

To reduce barriers to growth and investment, I’ve ordered a review of government regulations. When we find rules that put an unnecessary burden on businesses, we will fix them. But I will not hesitate to create or enforce commonsense safeguards to protect the American people. That’s what we’ve done in this country for more than a century. It’s why our food is safe to eat, our water is safe to drink, and our air is safe to breathe. It’s why we have speed limits and child labor laws. It’s why last year, we put in place consumer protections against hidden fees and penalties by credit card companies, and new rules to prevent another financial crisis. And it’s why we passed reform that finally prevents the health insurance industry from exploiting patients.

Now, I’ve heard rumors that a few of you have some concerns about the new health care law. So let me be the first to say that anything can be improved. If you have ideas about how to improve this law by making care better or more affordable, I am eager to work with you. We can start right now by correcting a flaw in the legislation that has placed an unnecessary bookkeeping burden on small businesses.

What I’m not willing to do is go back to the days when insurance companies could deny someone coverage because of a pre-existing condition. I’m not willing to tell James Howard, a brain cancer patient from Texas, that his treatment might not be covered. I’m not willing to tell Jim Houser, a small business owner from Oregon, that he has to go back to paying $5,000 more to cover his employees. As we speak, this law is making prescription drugs cheaper for seniors and giving uninsured students a chance to stay on their parents’ coverage. So instead of re-fighting the battles of the last two years, let’s fix what needs fixing and move forward.

Now, the final step — a critical step — in winning the future is to make sure we aren’t buried under a mountain of debt.

We are living with a legacy of deficit-spending that began almost a decade ago. And in the wake of the financial crisis, some of that was necessary to keep credit flowing, save jobs, and put money in people’s pockets.

But now that the worst of the recession is over, we have to confront the fact that our government spends more than it takes in. That is not sustainable. Every day, families sacrifice to live within their means. They deserve a government that does the same.

So tonight, I am proposing that starting this year, we freeze annual domestic spending for the next five years. This would reduce the deficit by more than $400 billion over the next decade, and will bring discretionary spending to the lowest share of our economy since Dwight Eisenhower was president.

This freeze will require painful cuts. Already, we have frozen the salaries of hardworking federal employees for the next two years. I’ve proposed cuts to things I care deeply about, like community action programs. The Secretary of Defense has also agreed to cut tens of billions of dollars in spending that he and his generals believe our military can do without.

I recognize that some in this Chamber have already proposed deeper cuts, and I’m willing to eliminate whatever we can honestly afford to do without. But let’s make sure that we’re not doing it on the backs of our most vulnerable citizens. And let’s make sure what we’re cutting is really excess weight. Cutting the deficit by gutting our investments in innovation and education is like lightening an overloaded airplane by removing its engine. It may feel like you’re flying high at first, but it won’t take long before you’ll feel the impact.

Now, most of the cuts and savings I’ve proposed only address annual domestic spending, which represents a little more than 12% of our budget. To make further progress, we have to stop pretending that cutting this kind of spending alone will be enough. It won’t.

The bipartisan Fiscal Commission I created last year made this crystal clear. I don’t agree with all their proposals, but they made important progress. And their conclusion is that the only way to tackle our deficit is to cut excessive spending wherever we find it — in domestic spending, defense spending, health care spending, and spending through tax breaks and loopholes.

This means further reducing health care costs, including programs like Medicare and Medicaid, which are the single biggest contributor to our long-term deficit. Health insurance reform will slow these rising costs, which is part of why nonpartisan economists have said that repealing the health care law would add a quarter of a trillion dollars to our deficit. Still, I’m willing to look at other ideas to bring down costs, including one that Republicans suggested last year: medical malpractice reform to rein in frivolous lawsuits.

To put us on solid ground, we should also find a bipartisan solution to strengthen Social Security for future generations. And we must do it without putting at risk current retirees, the most vulnerable, or people with disabilities; without slashing benefits for future generations; and without subjecting Americans’ guaranteed retirement income to the whims of the stock market.

And if we truly care about our deficit, we simply cannot afford a permanent extension of the tax cuts for the wealthiest 2% of Americans. Before we take money away from our schools, or scholarships away from our students, we should ask millionaires to give up their tax break.

It’s not a matter of punishing their success. It’s about promoting America’s success.

In fact, the best thing we could do on taxes for all Americans is to simplify the individual tax code. This will be a tough job, but members of both parties have expressed interest in doing this, and I am prepared to join them.

So now is the time to act. Now is the time for both sides and both houses of Congress — Democrats and Republicans — to forge a principled compromise that gets the job done. If we make the hard choices now to rein in our deficits, we can make the investments we need to win the future.

Let me take this one step further. We shouldn’t just give our people a government that’s more affordable. We should give them a government that’s more competent and efficient. We cannot win the future with a government of the past.

We live and do business in the information age, but the last major reorganization of the government happened in the age of black and white TV. There are twelve different agencies that deal with exports. There are at least five different entities that deal with housing policy. Then there’s my favorite example: the Interior Department is in charge of salmon while they’re in fresh water, but the Commerce Department handles them in when they’re in saltwater. And I hear it gets even more complicated once they’re smoked.

Now, we have made great strides over the last two years in using technology and getting rid of waste. Veterans can now download their electronic medical records with a click of the mouse. We’re selling acres of federal office space that hasn’t been used in years, and we will cut through red tape to get rid of more. But we need to think bigger. In the coming months, my administration will develop a proposal to merge, consolidate, and reorganize the federal government in a way that best serves the goal of a more competitive America. I will submit that proposal to Congress for a vote — and we will push to get it passed.

In the coming year, we will also work to rebuild people’s faith in the institution of government. Because you deserve to know exactly how and where your tax dollars are being spent, you will be able to go to a website and get that information for the very first time in history. Because you deserve to know when your elected officials are meeting with lobbyists, I ask Congress to do what the White House has already done: put that information online. And because the American people deserve to know that special interests aren’t larding up legislation with pet projects, both parties in Congress should know this: if a bill comes to my desk with earmarks inside, I will veto it.

A 21st century government that’s open and competent. A government that lives within its means. An economy that’s driven by new skills and ideas. Our success in this new and changing world will require reform, responsibility, and innovation. It will also require us to approach that world with a new level of engagement in our foreign affairs.

Just as jobs and businesses can now race across borders, so can new threats and new challenges. No single wall separates East and West; no one rival superpower is aligned against us.

And so we must defeat determined enemies wherever they are, and build coalitions that cut across lines of region and race and religion. America’s moral example must always shine for all who yearn for freedom, justice, and dignity. And because we have begun this work, tonight we can say that American leadership has been renewed and America’s standing has been restored.

Look to Iraq, where nearly 100,000 of our brave men and women have left with their heads held high; where American combat patrols have ended; violence has come down; and a new government has been formed. This year, our civilians will forge a lasting partnership with the Iraqi people, while we finish the job of bringing our troops out of Iraq. America’s commitment has been kept; the Iraq War is coming to an end.

Of course, as we speak, al Qaeda and their affiliates continue to plan attacks against us. Thanks to our intelligence and law enforcement professionals, we are disrupting plots and securing our cities and skies. And as extremists try to inspire acts of violence within our borders, we are responding with the strength of our communities, with respect for the rule of law, and with the conviction that American Muslims are a part of our American family.

We have also taken the fight to al Qaeda and their allies abroad. In Afghanistan, our troops have taken Taliban strongholds and trained Afghan Security Forces. Our purpose is clear — by preventing the Taliban from reestablishing a stranglehold over the Afghan people, we will deny al Qaeda the safe-haven that served as a launching pad for 9/11.

Thanks to our heroic troops and civilians, fewer Afghans are under the control of the insurgency. There will be tough fighting ahead, and the Afghan government will need to deliver better governance. But we are strengthening the capacity of the Afghan people and building an enduring partnership with them. This year, we will work with nearly 50 countries to begin a transition to an Afghan lead. And this July, we will begin to bring our troops home.

In Pakistan, al Qaeda’s leadership is under more pressure than at any point since 2001. Their leaders and operatives are being removed from the battlefield. Their safe-havens are shrinking. And we have sent a message from the Afghan border to the Arabian Peninsula to all parts of the globe: we will not relent, we will not waver, and we will defeat you.

American leadership can also be seen in the effort to secure the worst weapons of war. Because Republicans and Democrats approved the New START Treaty, far fewer nuclear weapons and launchers will be deployed. Because we rallied the world, nuclear materials are being locked down on every continent so they never fall into the hands of terrorists.

Because of a diplomatic effort to insist that Iran meet its obligations, the Iranian government now faces tougher and tighter sanctions than ever before. And on the Korean peninsula, we stand with our ally South Korea, and insist that North Korea keeps its commitment to abandon nuclear weapons.

This is just a part of how we are shaping a world that favors peace and prosperity. With our European allies, we revitalized NATO, and increased our cooperation on everything from counter-terrorism to missile defense. We have reset our relationship with Russia, strengthened Asian alliances, and built new partnerships with nations like India. This March, I will travel to Brazil, Chile, and El Salvador to forge new alliances for progress in the Americas. Around the globe, we are standing with those who take responsibility — helping farmers grow more food; supporting doctors who care for the sick; and combating the corruption that can rot a society and rob people of opportunity.

Recent events have shown us that what sets us apart must not just be our power — it must be the purpose behind it. In South Sudan — with our assistance — the people were finally able to vote for independence after years of war. Thousands lined up before dawn. People danced in the streets. One man who lost four of his brothers at war summed up the scene around him: “This was a battlefield for most of my life. Now we want to be free.”

We saw that same desire to be free in Tunisia, where the will of the people proved more powerful than the writ of a dictator. And tonight, let us be clear: the United States of America stands with the people of Tunisia, and supports the democratic aspirations of all people.

We must never forget that the things we’ve struggled for, and fought for, live in the hearts of people everywhere. And we must always remember that the Americans who have borne the greatest burden in this struggle are the men and women who serve our country.

Tonight, let us speak with one voice in reaffirming that our nation is united in support of our troops and their families. Let us serve them as well as they have served us — by giving them the equipment they need; by providing them with the care and benefits they have earned; and by enlisting our veterans in the great task of building our own nation.

Our troops come from every corner of this country – they are black, white, Latino, Asian and Native American. They are Christian and Hindu, Jewish and Muslim. And, yes, we know that some of them are gay. Starting this year, no American will be forbidden from serving the country they love because of who they love. And with that change, I call on all of our college campuses to open their doors to our military recruiters and the ROTC. It is time to leave behind the divisive battles of the past. It is time to move forward as one nation.

We should have no illusions about the work ahead of us. Reforming our schools; changing the way we use energy; reducing our deficit — none of this is easy. All of it will take time. And it will be harder because we will argue about everything. The cost. The details. The letter of every law.

Of course, some countries don’t have this problem. If the central government wants a railroad, they get a railroad — no matter how many homes are bulldozed. If they don’t want a bad story in the newspaper, it doesn’t get written.

And yet, as contentious and frustrating and messy as our democracy can sometimes be, I know there isn’t a person here who would trade places with any other nation on Earth.

We may have differences in policy, but we all believe in the rights enshrined in our Constitution. We may have different opinions, but we believe in the same promise that says this is a place where you can make it if you try. We may have different backgrounds, but we believe in the same dream that says this is a country where anything’s possible. No matter who you are. No matter where you come from.

That dream is why I can stand here before you tonight. That dream is why a working class kid from Scranton can stand behind me. That dream is why someone who began by sweeping the floors of his father’s Cincinnati bar can preside as Speaker of the House in the greatest nation on Earth.

That dream — that American Dream — is what drove the Allen Brothers to reinvent their roofing company for a new era. It’s what drove those students at Forsyth Tech to learn a new skill and work towards the future. And that dream is the story of a small business owner named Brandon Fisher.

Brandon started a company in Berlin, Pennsylvania that specializes in a new kind of drilling technology. One day last summer, he saw the news that halfway across the world, 33 men were trapped in a Chilean mine, and no one knew how to save them.

But Brandon thought his company could help. And so he designed a rescue that would come to be known as Plan B. His employees worked around the clock to manufacture the necessary drilling equipment. And Brandon left for Chile.

Along with others, he began drilling a 2,000 foot hole into the ground, working three or four days at a time with no sleep. Thirty-seven days later, Plan B succeeded, and the miners were rescued. But because he didn’t want all of the attention, Brandon wasn’t there when the miners emerged. He had already gone home, back to work on his next project.

Later, one of his employees said of the rescue, “We proved that Center Rock is a little company, but we do big things.”

We do big things.

From the earliest days of our founding, America has been the story of ordinary people who dare to dream. That’s how we win the future.

We are a nation that says, “I might not have a lot of money, but I have this great idea for a new company. I might not come from a family of college graduates, but I will be the first to get my degree. I might not know those people in trouble, but I think I can help them, and I need to try. I’m not sure how we’ll reach that better place beyond the horizon, but I know we’ll get there. I know we will.”

We do big things.

The idea of America endures. Our destiny remains our choice. And tonight, more than two centuries later, it is because of our people that our future is hopeful, our journey goes forward, and the state of our union is strong.

Thank you, God Bless You, and may God Bless the United States of America.

Obama’s second State of the Union address called for investment in education and infrastructure, tax-code reform and an historic investment to achieve 80% clean energy by 2035

One seat was left vacant, in honor of Rep. Gabby Giffords (D-AZ), who is currently recovering from a severe gunshot wound to the head, suffered during an assassination attempt that killed 6 people. Pres. Obama opened his remarks with a tribute to the new Speaker of the House, John Boehner of Ohio, a unifying gesture that won loud applause from the hall. Obama then struck a somber tone and asked everyone to consider the lessons of the tragedy in Tucson.

“Tucson reminded us,” he intoned “that no matter who we are or where we came from, each of us is a part of something greater, something more consequential… we are part of the American family… we are still bound together as one people, and we share common hopes and common dreams…” This idea would strike the tone of his address, seeking pragmatic common ground and a commitment to building a stronger future in which Americans can thrive together in a free and democratic society.

Obama noted the partisan divide and the night’s unique gesture of civility —Republicans and Democrats sitting side-by-side—, observing it was “not whether we can sit together tonight, but whether we can work together tomorrow”, that will determine if the country moves forward into a new era of prosperity, which won another standing ovation including every member of both parties.

He added that “We will move forward together, or not at all, for the challenges we face are bigger than party, and bigger than politics.” He pledged to focus on ”whether new jobs and industries take root in this country, or somewhere else… whether hard work is rewarded”.

“We are poised for progress”, said Obama, then naming several key economic indicators, and suggested that we measure our progress not by those data alone, but by the wellbeing “of our people”, the ability of innovators and hard working people to build a better future.

“Thanks to the tax cuts we passed, Americans’ paychecks are a little bigger”, he said, praising Democrats and Republicans for coming together to make that happen. He suggested this is the kind of cooperation and constructive compromise that is needed going forward, but later specified that Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest of the wealthy should be allowed to expire in 2012.

“To win the future,” he said, “we’ll need to take on challenges that have been decades in the making.” He explained that once upon a time, communities across the country offered long-term economic stability and opportunity, but that the rules have changed after decades of rapid-fire technological innovation, and it was the work of government, of educators and of private enterprise to build a nation that can compete and prosper in that global marketplace.

He warned of those challenges, specifically: “Just recently, China became the home to the world’s largest private solar research facility, and the world’s fastest computer, so yes, things have changed.” But he added that ”America still has the largest, most prosperous economy” and spoke of how no other nation had the dynamism or vast potential to capitalize on this century so demanding of innovation.

He praised the unique nature of America’s approach to education —the aim of cultivating an informed and active electorate— noting: “We are the first nation to be founded for the sake of an idea, the idea that each of us deserves the chance to shape our own destiny… that’s why our students don’t just memorize equations, but answer questions like ‘What do you think of that idea?’, ‘What would you do to change the world?’”

He reiterated what seemed to be the refrain of his address, proclaiming that “The future is ours to win.” He then declared that ”We need to out-innovate, out-educate and out-build” the rest of the world and detailed key areas of reform where government can help make that happen.

“We need to take responsibility for our deficit and reform our government; that’s how we’ll win the future… and tonight, I’d like to talk about how we get there…” He said the very first step is to invest in innovation, that the government needs to believe in and defend the imagination and the ingenuity of the American people, adding that “innovation doesn’t just change our lives; it is how we make our living.”

“Throughout our history,” he said, “our government has provided cutting edge innovators and inventors with the resources they need”. He praised the virtues of government action to support innovators and entrepreneurs, to spur major innovations and usher in a period of widespread economic prosperity. He spoke of the shock experienced in the United States when the Soviet Union launched the first satellite into orbit.

“This is our generation’s Sputnik moment,” he declared, as he sought to inspire a Kennedy era commitment to reforming and innovating across the economy. He said his forthcoming budget will commit new resources and new incentives to spurring major new innovations in ”biomedical research, information technology, and especially clean energy technology”.

“We’re not just handing out money,” he noted, “we’re issuing a challenge… we’ll fund the Apollo projects of our time.” The US “can become the first nation to have a million electric cars on the road, and said he would push to ”eliminate the billions of dollars in subsidies we currently give to oil companies”. Echoing New Jersey’s Sen. Frank Lautenberg, he pointed out that the oil companies are “doing just fine on their own.”

“So, instead of subsidizing yesterday’s energy, let’s invest in the energy of tomorrow.” He pledged that by 2035, 80% of America’s energy will come from clean energy sources.” He coupled the project of building a more dynamic, more innovative America with the need to vastly improve the nation’s commitment to education at all levels.

The president observed, soberly, that “America’s fallen to 9th in terms of people with a college degree.” He called for action to promote higher education, but noted that “It’s family that first instills a love of learning in a child; it’s parents who need to turn the TV off. We need to teach our children it’s not just the winner of the Super Bowl who should be celebrated, but the winner of the science fair.”

This line received another bipartisan standing ovation, and was in a sense the groundwork for his expression of the principle that there needs to be community-oriented social spending that will strengthen families and provide parents with the time they need to invest more energy in their children’s education.

Schools, Obama said, should places “of high expectations and high performance”. When Pres. Obama touted the virtues of the Race to the Top competition for new funding among states, his call to replace “No Child Left Behind” with a more focused, more intelligent approach to improving the actual quality of education available to the nation’s children.

“In South Korea, teachers are known as ‘nation builders’”, he observed, suggesting that “here in America, it’s time we treated the people who teach our children with the same level of respect.” He won praise for his version of education reform, and as one observer noted, made the Secretary of Education the most prominent member of his cabinet in the context of his address.

The president explained his intention to commit new resources to improving the quality of education across the country, using the best tested and proven ideas of both Republican and Democratic governors. “Over the next 10 years, with so many baby-boomers retiring from our classrooms, we want to prepare 100,000 new teachers.” For young people currently in the course of study, he urged that “If you want to make a difference… become a teacher; your country needs you.”

Again, the entire room filled with the sound of a bipartisan standing ovation.

Pres. Obama went on to say that all people must have the same opportunity to go to college. He explained his administration’s major reform to the financial aid system, saying “That’s why we’ve ended the unwarranted taxpayer subsidies that went to banks”, enabling the government to devote more actual cash to loans and provide long-term repayment relief.

He said he will call on Congress to make permanent the college tuition tax credit, worth $10,000 for four years of higher education. He described these measures as necessary for reaching “the goal I set two years ago,” that “By the end of the decade, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.”

He spoke of all the children who study in America’s schools but face the risk of deportation, due to their parents’ inability to get legal documentation for them, a clear reference to the still pending DREAM Act, which would allow young people who stay in school and happen to lack legal documentation for residency to get on a path to citizenship.

Of college students coming from other nations, he noted that “As soon as they obtain their degrees, we send them back home to compete against us. It makes no sense.” He used the refrain “It makes no sense” multiple times, to point out key areas of policy where ideological opponents can agree on the need to take action to further goals commonly held by all.

He called for action to addres the very serious problem of “illegal immigration”, but pushed for respect for the rights and dignity of “talented responsible young people”, and to recognize the contributions of workers living “in the shadows”. He sought to show the value of an America bathed in sunshine, i.e. transparency, where people are able to live and work and collaborate, in the open.

He added to the need for innovation and education, the need to overhaul and reinvent the nation’s infrastructure, the hardware framework of the economy: “We need the fastest, most reliable ways to move people and information, from high-speed rail to high-speed internet. Our infrastructure used to be the best, but our leadership has slipped.” He explained that prosperous new communities don’t just spring up out of nowhere; they are built around major construction projects, train stations along new transportation routes.

“Our goal is to give 80% of Americans access to high-speed rail,” adding that it could be twice as fast as driving and ”For some trips it will be faster than flying, without the pat-down.” He also reminded his audience that at the moment, ”routes in California and the midwest are already underway.”

He explained that all the investment in new and improved infrastructure is about building a prosperous future that works for all Americans. Of course, there are serious obstacles to doing this built into the tax code by well paid lobbyists working for corporate interests, who have persistently bent the ear of Congress, for decades. Pres. Obama said ”a parade of lobbyists has rigged the tax code to benefit specific businesses or industries”, and added that he would be ”asking Democrats and Republicans to simplify the system, get rid of the loopholes, level the playing field.”

“Recently we signed agreements with China and India that will support at least 250,000 jobs.” Obama said he had ordered a review of all regulations and that any which pose an unnecessary burden on business will be fixed, so that job-creation can continue and expand, but that he “will not hesitate to create or enforce common-sense safeguards to protect the American people.”

For Republicans opposed to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, he said “If you have ideas about how to improve this law by making care better, or more affordable, I’m willing to work with you.” He sought to draw a line between unserious efforts to repeal much-needed reforms that are already in place and showing results and the more constructive approach of working together to make sure those reforms perform even better for the people who most need them, while lowering costs for everyone.

Obama then detailed all of the reforms he will not go back on: he will not allow insurers to refuse care for sickness (pre-existing conditions); he will not leave small business-owners having to pay $5,000 more for insuring their employees; he will not force millions of young people off of their parents’ insurance plans.

The president then said he was “proposing that starting this year, we freeze annual domestic spending for five years. This will reduce our deficit by $400 billion and bring domestic discretionary spending to its lowest share of our economy since Dwight Eisenhower was president.” He pointed out that “annual domestic spending… represents a little more than 12% of our budget.”

“I’m willing to eliminate whatever we can legitimately afford to do without,” he said, “but let’s make sure we’re not doing it on the backs of our most vulnerable.” This was, again, a line in the sand, a strong defense of the reasoning behind and the very real need for principled regulation and constructive social spending that allows real people to live more freely and more prosperously.

Obama said that the wrong kind of cuts to social spending would be the equivalent of “lightening an overloaded airplane by removing its engines: you might feel like you’re flying high at first, but it won’t take long before you feel the impact.”

The Democratic president then took the reins on an issue that has been the darling of Republicans for a generation, but has gained little traction in Washington. “The best thing we could do on taxes for all Americansis to simplify the individual tax code,” he said. This won a bemused facial expression from the Republican House Speaker behind him, and hinted at the prospect of some bipartisan progress in 2011.

“We shouldn’t just give our people a government that’s more affordable,” he went on; “we should give them a government that’s more competent, more efficient.” He pointed out that ”There are 12 different agencies that deal with exports” and noted his “favorite” example of executive overlap: the Interior Department has authority over salmon when they are in fresh water, but the Commerce Department has authority over them when they are in salt water.

Obama promised to send a proposal to Congress within the next 6 months to reform the entire federal government, cutting overlap and waste. This may have been the most surprising announcement to many of his most fevered opponents. Republicans want to institute major reforms to the structure of the executive branch of government, mostly to close agencies that oversee social spending; with a Democratic president pushing this pet Republican cause in the midst of a fight to cut government, Obama may successfully defend those agencies, while actually achieving major improvements in the way of efficiency and cost.

He also decried the role of for-profit lobbyists in shaping the views and the agenda of elected officials. “You deserve to know when your elected officials are meeting with lobbyists, so I ask Congress to do what the executive branch is already doing.” The administration is already publishing information about meetings with lobbyists, and the president wants Congress to make public all encounters with paid lobbyists working to promote wealthy special interests.

He said that in the interest of neutralizing the power of corporate lobbyists on Capitol Hill, he will veto any legislation of any kind that comes to his desk “with earmarks in it”. This is a very bold declaration, challenging the Republican-controlled House of Representatives to live by its words and protests and to deny itself the much loved, much maligned earmarks that give them control of federal spending.

He called for a new era of international leadership and engagement, demanding that “America’s moral example must always shine for all who year for freedom and justice and dignity.” There was full bipartisan applause for the president’s Iraq withdrawal, when he said that 100,000 soldiers had already left Iraq “with their heads held high”.

He said it was a basic American value to welcome “American muslims as part of our American family”, another line which drew a brief, bipartisan standing ovation. The president spoke about the need to build strong alliances across the world, and said the United States is standing with peoples around the world to promote democracy, cooperation and opportunity. He said his administration is ”combatting the corruption that can rot a society and rob people of opportunity” in countries around the world.

“In South Sudan,” he noted, “with our assistance, the people were finally able to vote for independence after years of war”. He added, with firmness, that ”The United States stands with Tunisia and supports the democratic aspirations of all people. We must never forget that the things we’ve fought for and struggled for live in the hearts of people everywhere, and we must never forget” the sacrifice of those who have served in the military in times of war.

“Tonight let us speak with one voice in reaffirming that our nation is united in support of our troops and their families… and by enlisting our veterans in creating the great nation they served”, and added that ”Starting this year, no American will be forbidden from serving their country because of who they love, and because of that change, I call on all our college campuses to open their doors to military recruiters and ROTC.”

“None of this will be easy, all of it will take time, and it will be harder, because we will argue about everything… and yet as contentious and messy and frustrating as our democracy may be, I know there isn’t a person here who would trade places with any other nation on Earth.” This won Obama the most resounding bipartisan cheers, and sustained standing ovation of the speech.

He spoke of the real meaning of the American dream, that any person can achieve anything he or she works for earnestly. “That dream,” he said, “is why I’m able to stand here before you tonight; that dream is why a working-class kid from Scranton can sit behind me; that dream is why someone who by sweeping the floors of his father’s Cincinnatti bar can serve as Speaker of the House of the greatest nation on Earth.”

Obama singled out the young entrepreneur whose firm’s unique new drilling process allowed for the creation of “Plan B”, the strategy that dug 2,000 feet into the ground and liberated 33 Chilean miners in 37 days, far more quickly than anyone had expected, given the challenges.

While the president was gradually departing from the chamber, CNN showed a picture of Mark Kelly, the astronaut and husband of Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, holding her hand as they watched the president’s address together. Giffords was not shown, but is said to be improving and nearly ready to enter full physical rehabilitation.

There is little doubt that the United States is experiencing a long-term crisis in the scarcity of gainful employment. It is, in fact, persistently difficult for many laid off workers to find jobs even at a steep pay cut. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act did a great deal to staunch the bleeding, and has helped move the economy toward a grudging reversal in job trends, but we are still saddled with two major Bush-era policy shifts that are hampering job creation almost across the board.

The first is the unprecedented giveaway of nearly $2 trillion in tax revenues, during the years 2001-2010, to mostly the wealthiest Americans. The Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 were in fact the largest single transfer of wealth in American history, a giveaway of needed government revenues to those who least required a handout. The Bush team’s thinking was trickle-down economics to the extreme: if we give more than a trillion dollars to the wealthiest Americans, they will have to pass on that wealth by “creating jobs”.

The flaw in this reasoning was that the real impact, the real incentive of the Bush handout was: if the wealthiest interests in our society can earn more than a trillion dollars without lifting a finger, why should they waste money creating jobs? This latter logic has proven to be much closer to the economic shift we experienced in the wake of those tax cuts. American businesses began moving jobs overseas at record pace, and even pressed for the further relaxation of labor laws, so job creation wouldn’t be “so costly”.

The transfer of wealth was further exaggerated when the Bush administration persuaded Congress to overhaul bankruptcy laws, making it much harder for individuals to escape crippling debt through bankruptcy protection, while making it easier for corporations to do so. Banks whose balance sheets were riddled with bad debt resulting from mathematically unsustainable and predatory lending practices could hide their exposure by taking advantage of both sides of that bankruptcy reform.

The second major economic policy shift that took place under George W. Bush was the near total deregulation of the banking sector. Pres. Clinton had signed major bank deregulation legislation in the late ’90s, but the intention was not to give major banks carte blanche to set up a fictional trading regime which no human being could track and in which the private wealth of most Americans could be made vulnerable to systemic fraud. The Bush years, however, saw a shift in regulatory infrastructure which invited (and brought) such abuse.

Allowing major banks to not only hold deposits and make loans, but to sell stock, to convert loans into securities, to gamble with pension plans, to sell insurance, some of which was designed to insure against the collapse of their other financial products, was a calamitous miscalculation. It is what invited and brought about the worst financial abuses in generations and led to the worldwide financial collapse of 2007-2008.

If banks are not accountable for the truthfulness of their wealth claims, they have every incentive to first begin, then expand, the very risky fictionalization of wealth that we saw in the years 2001-2008. With unprecedented amounts of free cash floating around in the bank accounts of the wealthiest of the wealthy, the financial sector experienced an incredible boom in dollars invested. The comprehensive deregulation of the financial sector then allowed them to use this new economic reality to vastly inflate the value of that private wealth, by investing not in productive business opportunities, but spurious and ill-designed financial “instruments”, the true value of which was simply the point-blank multiplication of wealth.

To say that wealth is fictionalized is a specific charge: the entire financial services sector embarked on a complicated re-engineering of the meaning of investment. No longer was the smartest gamble the investment of hard cash into real businesses producing actual products and services with corresponding measurable market value; now, the focus shifted to investments in securitized investments, pools of wealth claims not corresponding to any measurable, grounded economic activity.

Building “instruments” designed to expand the financial holdings of clients was the new game. Bad loans were bundled into “mortgage-backed securities”. One could buy one-tenth of 1% of a bundle of 1,000 home loans, the total cash value of which can never exceed the contracted amount plus interest over time, in hopes that other investors will throw so much money at the same security that its financial value (wholly detached from its real economic value) will escalate wildly.

If this sounds risky, your bank could secure its other holdings against the risks of mortgage-backed securities by engaging in “credit default swaps”. The simplest way to explain these is to say that two or more banks agree to shore each other up against massive credit losses, to provide baseline security to the already improbable investment values tied to the pooling of mostly risky mortgages.

These two policy shifts saw the United States government give away $2 trillion, at the beginning of a decade which would cost nearly $2 trillion in war spending, only to throw in another $1 trillion at the tail end, to pay for the clean-up, leaving major financial institutions not only intact, despite systematic abuses, but far wealthier with respect to the average American business or household than ever before. This policy shift was undertaken deliberately by the Bush administration, and to some extent, the policy goal of putting more power into the hands of a concentrated minority of the wealthiest interests was achieved.

The current administration is dealing with the aftermath of this decade of decadence; Pres. Obama has the unenviable task of wrestling with the resulting wave of unemployment, challenging deeply held assumptions about the American genius for creating wealth and reminding citizens and politicians that free as we are, most individuals have little control over their economic circumstances. Should he raise taxes? Fine the banks? Institute wage controls on investment bankers? Ban irrationally huge executive bonuses?

His critics allege he is desperate to do each of these, and yet he has never attempted even one of them, as a response to the financial crisis. The only area where taxes have been increased during Obama’s presidency, is on the wealthiest recipients of the most expensive health insurance policies. Economists of every stripe agree this will help to bring down costs and insure more people.

Pres. Obama’s approach to the financial collapse, the government’s fiscal crisis and persistent unemployment, has been to seek solutions that will allow private markets to deal better with the challenges of the day. The bluster and character assassination from his critics has been relentless, but the fact is, he has not proposed socialist fixes to the converging crises in American markets; he has, instead, sought to make it possible for individuals and businesses to fare better, while aiming to defictionalize the investment markets without prompting a sudden collapse of values in any sector of the economy.

In this sense, Obama has been largely successful. Most economic trend lines appear to be moving in the right direction, including job-creation. In 2009 and 2010, the US economy created far more jobs than during the Bush years, 2001-2008. But employment is lagging desperately behind other economic indicators. The weakness in the US jobs market can be traced directly to these two vitally ill-conceived economic policy shifts: the massive transfer of wealth the wealthy (an incentive large enough to remove all incentives) and near total free rein to the financial sector (allowing the wealthy to isolate their wealth without losing it, undermining the capitalist-democratic model whereby wealth flows throughout the society).

Financial regulatory reform, passed by the Democratic Congress and signed into law by Pres. Obama, was a significant step in the right direction, banning some of the worst abuses, targeting crucial conflicts of interest, and instituting a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which will, for the first time in US history, give ordinary Americans a regulatory watchdog specifically designed to protect against systemic fraud and abuse in the financial sector.

But we are still dealing with the bulk of the costs of these two key Bush-era policies, and the extension of the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans may serve to stabilize the slow jobs recovery, but it is unlikely to accelerate it. We have to examine whether, as a democratic republic, we have any reason for giving such massive new wealth and such unconstrained privilege, to the already wealthy and privileged, without even asking anything in return.

In a free society, the rule of law should grant each of us the core democratic liberties that make us whole people, able to act freely in the public sphere, but the system should not be so easily redesigned to serve the personal or corporate interests of a limited few or to impede the flow of capital (as a percentage of overall investment) to ordinary people and small businesses. The folly of the Bush years was to pretend that an economy planned for the select few would work for everyone. An economy aligned to privilege market dynamics that elevate working families, citizens and communities, will enrich the wealthy, but not at the expense of everyone else.

The following is an official transcript of remarks by the President at a memorial service for the victims of the mass shooting in Tucson, Arizona, as delivered at the McKale Memorial Center at the University of Arizona, in Tucson:

6:43 P.M. MST

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you. (Applause.) Thank you very much. Please, please be seated. (Applause.)

To the families of those we’ve lost; to all who called them friends; to the students of this university, the public servants who are gathered here, the people of Tucson and the people of Arizona: I have come here tonight as an American who, like all Americans, kneels to pray with you today and will stand by you tomorrow. (Applause.)

There is nothing I can say that will fill the sudden hole torn in your hearts. But know this: The hopes of a nation are here tonight. We mourn with you for the fallen. We join you in your grief. And we add our faith to yours that Representative Gabrielle Giffords and the other living victims of this tragedy will pull through. (Applause.)

Scripture tells us:

There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God,
the holy place where the Most High dwells.
God is within her, she will not fall;
God will help her at break of day.

On Saturday morning, Gabby, her staff and many of her constituents gathered outside a supermarket to exercise their right to peaceful assembly and free speech. (Applause.) They were fulfilling a central tenet of the democracy envisioned by our founders –- representatives of the people answering questions to their constituents, so as to carry their concerns back to our nation’s capital. Gabby called it “Congress on Your Corner” -– just an updated version of government of and by and for the people. (Applause.)

And that quintessentially American scene, that was the scene that was shattered by a gunman’s bullets. And the six people who lost their lives on Saturday –- they, too, represented what is best in us, what is best in America. (Applause.)

Judge John Roll served our legal system for nearly 40 years. (Applause.) A graduate of this university and a graduate of this law school — (applause) — Judge Roll was recommended for the federal bench by John McCain 20 years ago — (applause) — appointed by President George H.W. Bush and rose to become Arizona’s chief federal judge. (Applause.)

His colleagues described him as the hardest-working judge within the Ninth Circuit. He was on his way back from attending Mass, as he did every day, when he decided to stop by and say hi to his representative. John is survived by his loving wife, Maureen, his three sons and his five beautiful grandchildren. (Applause.)

George and Dorothy Morris -– “Dot” to her friends -– were high school sweethearts who got married and had two daughters. They did everything together — traveling the open road in their RV, enjoying what their friends called a 50-year honeymoon. Saturday morning, they went by the Safeway to hear what their congresswoman had to say. When gunfire rang out, George, a former Marine, instinctively tried to shield his wife. (Applause.) Both were shot. Dot passed away.

A New Jersey native, Phyllis Schneck retired to Tucson to beat the snow. But in the summer, she would return East, where her world revolved around her three children, her seven grandchildren and 2-year-old great-granddaughter. A gifted quilter, she’d often work under a favorite tree, or sometimes she’d sew aprons with the logos of the Jets and the Giants — (laughter) — to give out at the church where she volunteered. A Republican, she took a liking to Gabby, and wanted to get to know her better. (Applause.)

Dorwan and Mavy Stoddard grew up in Tucson together -– about 70 years ago. They moved apart and started their own respective families. But after both were widowed they found their way back here, to, as one of Mavy’s daughters put it, “be boyfriend and girlfriend again.” (Laughter.)

When they weren’t out on the road in their motor home, you could find them just up the road, helping folks in need at the Mountain Avenue Church of Christ. A retired construction worker, Dorwan spent his spare time fixing up the church along with his dog, Tux. His final act of selflessness was to dive on top of his wife, sacrificing his life for hers. (Applause.)

Everything — everything — Gabe Zimmerman did, he did with passion. (Applause.) But his true passion was helping people. As Gabby’s outreach director, he made the cares of thousands of her constituents his own, seeing to it that seniors got the Medicare benefits that they had earned, that veterans got the medals and the care that they deserved, that government was working for ordinary folks. He died doing what he loved -– talking with people and seeing how he could help. And Gabe is survived by his parents, Ross and Emily, his brother, Ben, and his fiancée, Kelly, who he planned to marry next year. (Applause.)

And then there is nine-year-old Christina Taylor Green. Christina was an A student; she was a dancer; she was a gymnast; she was a swimmer. She decided that she wanted to be the first woman to play in the Major Leagues, and as the only girl on her Little League team, no one put it past her. (Applause.)

She showed an appreciation for life uncommon for a girl her age. She’d remind her mother, “We are so blessed. We have the best life.” And she’d pay those blessings back by participating in a charity that helped children who were less fortunate.

Our hearts are broken by their sudden passing. Our hearts are broken -– and yet, our hearts also have reason for fullness.
Our hearts are full of hope and thanks for the 13 Americans who survived the shooting, including the congresswoman many of them went to see on Saturday.

I have just come from the University Medical Center, just a mile from here, where our friend Gabby courageously fights to recover even as we speak. And I want to tell you — her husband Mark is here and he allows me to share this with you — right after we went to visit, a few minutes after we left her room and some of her colleagues in Congress were in the room, Gabby opened her eyes for the first time. (Applause.) Gabby opened her eyes for the first time. (Applause.)

Gabby opened her eyes. Gabby opened her eyes, so I can tell you she knows we are here. She knows we love her. And she knows that we are rooting for her through what is undoubtedly going to be a difficult journey. We are there for her. (Applause.)

Our hearts are full of thanks for that good news, and our hearts are full of gratitude for those who saved others. We are grateful to Daniel Hernandez — (applause) — a volunteer in Gabby’s office. (Applause.)

And, Daniel, I’m sorry, you may deny it, but we’ve decided you are a hero because — (applause) — you ran through the chaos to minister to your boss, and tended to her wounds and helped keep her alive. (Applause.)

We are grateful to the men who tackled the gunman as he stopped to reload. (Applause.) Right over there. (Applause.) We are grateful for petite Patricia Maisch, who wrestled away the killer’s ammunition, and undoubtedly saved some lives. (Applause.) And we are grateful for the doctors and nurses and first responders who worked wonders to heal those who’d been hurt. We are grateful to them. (Applause.)

These men and women remind us that heroism is found not only on the fields of battle. They remind us that heroism does not require special training or physical strength. Heroism is here, in the hearts of so many of our fellow citizens, all around us, just waiting to be summoned -– as it was on Saturday morning. Their actions, their selflessness poses a challenge to each of us. It raises a question of what, beyond prayers and expressions of concern, is required of us going forward. How can we honor the fallen? How can we be true to their memory?

You see, when a tragedy like this strikes, it is part of our nature to demand explanations –- to try and pose some order on the chaos and make sense out of that which seems senseless. Already we’ve seen a national conversation commence, not only about the motivations behind these killings, but about everything from the merits of gun safety laws to the adequacy of our mental health system. And much of this process, of debating what might be done to prevent such tragedies in the future, is an essential ingredient in our exercise of self-government.

But at a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized -– at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who happen to think differently than we do -– it’s important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we’re talking with each other in a way that heals, not in a way that wounds. (Applause.)

Scripture tells us that there is evil in the world, and that terrible things happen for reasons that defy human understanding. In the words of Job, “When I looked for light, then came darkness.” Bad things happen, and we have to guard against simple explanations in the aftermath.

For the truth is none of us can know exactly what triggered this vicious attack. None of us can know with any certainty what might have stopped these shots from being fired, or what thoughts lurked in the inner recesses of a violent man’s mind. Yes, we have to examine all the facts behind this tragedy. We cannot and will not be passive in the face of such violence. We should be willing to challenge old assumptions in order to lessen the prospects of such violence in the future. (Applause.) But what we cannot do is use this tragedy as one more occasion to turn on each other. (Applause.) That we cannot do. (Applause.) That we cannot do.

As we discuss these issues, let each of us do so with a good dose of humility. Rather than pointing fingers or assigning blame, let’s use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy and remind ourselves of all the ways that our hopes and dreams are bound together. (Applause.)

After all, that’s what most of us do when we lose somebody in our family -– especially if the loss is unexpected. We’re shaken out of our routines. We’re forced to look inward. We reflect on the past: Did we spend enough time with an aging parent, we wonder. Did we express our gratitude for all the sacrifices that they made for us? Did we tell a spouse just how desperately we loved them, not just once in a while but every single day?

So sudden loss causes us to look backward -– but it also forces us to look forward; to reflect on the present and the future, on the manner in which we live our lives and nurture our relationships with those who are still with us. (Applause.)

We may ask ourselves if we’ve shown enough kindness and generosity and compassion to the people in our lives. Perhaps we question whether we’re doing right by our children, or our community, whether our priorities are in order.

We recognize our own mortality, and we are reminded that in the fleeting time we have on this Earth, what matters is not wealth, or status, or power, or fame -– but rather, how well we have loved — (applause)– and what small part we have played in making the lives of other people better. (Applause.)

And that process — that process of reflection, of making sure we align our values with our actions –- that, I believe, is what a tragedy like this requires.

For those who were harmed, those who were killed –- they are part of our family, an American family 300 million strong. (Applause.) We may not have known them personally, but surely we see ourselves in them. In George and Dot, in Dorwan and Mavy, we sense the abiding love we have for our own husbands, our own wives, our own life partners. Phyllis –- she’s our mom or our grandma; Gabe our brother or son. (Applause.) In Judge Roll, we recognize not only a man who prized his family and doing his job well, but also a man who embodied America’s fidelity to the law. (Applause.)

And in Gabby — in Gabby, we see a reflection of our public-spiritedness; that desire to participate in that sometimes frustrating, sometimes contentious, but always necessary and never-ending process to form a more perfect union. (Applause.)

And in Christina — in Christina we see all of our children. So curious, so trusting, so energetic, so full of magic. So deserving of our love. And so deserving of our good example.

If this tragedy prompts reflection and debate — as it should — let’s make sure it’s worthy of those we have lost. (Applause.) Let’s make sure it’s not on the usual plane of politics and point-scoring and pettiness that drifts away in the next news cycle.

The loss of these wonderful people should make every one of us strive to be better. To be better in our private lives, to be better friends and neighbors and coworkers and parents. And if, as has been discussed in recent days, their death helps usher in more civility in our public discourse, let us remember it is not because a simple lack of civility caused this tragedy — it did not — but rather because only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to the challenges of our nation in a way that would make them proud. (Applause.)

We should be civil because we want to live up to the example of public servants like John Roll and Gabby Giffords, who knew first and foremost that we are all Americans, and that we can question each other’s ideas without questioning each other’s love of country and that our task, working together, is to constantly widen the circle of our concern so that we bequeath the American Dream to future generations. (Applause.)

They believed — they believed, and I believe that we can be better. Those who died here, those who saved life here –- they help me believe. We may not be able to stop all evil in the world, but I know that how we treat one another, that’s entirely up to us. (Applause.)

And I believe that for all our imperfections, we are full of decency and goodness, and that the forces that divide us are not as strong as those that unite us. (Applause.)

That’s what I believe, in part because that’s what a child like Christina Taylor Green believed. (Applause.)

Imagine — imagine for a moment, here was a young girl who was just becoming aware of our democracy; just beginning to understand the obligations of citizenship; just starting to glimpse the fact that some day she, too, might play a part in shaping her nation’s future. She had been elected to her student council. She saw public service as something exciting and hopeful. She was off to meet her congresswoman, someone she was sure was good and important and might be a role model. She saw all this through the eyes of a child, undimmed by the cynicism or vitriol that we adults all too often just take for granted.

I want to live up to her expectations. (Applause.) I want our democracy to be as good as Christina imagined it. I want America to be as good as she imagined it. (Applause.) All of us -– we should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children’s expectations. (Applause.)

As has already been mentioned, Christina was given to us on September 11th, 2001, one of 50 babies born that day to be pictured in a book called “Faces of Hope.” On either side of her photo in that book were simple wishes for a child’s life. “I hope you help those in need,” read one. “I hope you know all the words to the National Anthem and sing it with your hand over your heart.” (Applause.) “I hope you jump in rain puddles.”

If there are rain puddles in Heaven, Christina is jumping in them today. (Applause.) And here on this Earth — here on this Earth, we place our hands over our hearts, and we commit ourselves as Americans to forging a country that is forever worthy of her gentle, happy spirit.

May God bless and keep those we’ve lost in restful and eternal peace. May He love and watch over the survivors. And may He bless the United States of America. (Applause.)

END 7:17 P.M. MST

Two days before she suffered a bullet wound the head in an assassination attempt, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords took to the floor of the House of Representatives to participate in the first-ever reading of the Constitution of the United States into the official record of House business. She read the First Amendment, which reads as follows:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Rep. Giffords, who is currently listed in critical condition and is under sedation to reduce the risk of trauma from swelling, was attacked while she was observing that fundamental Constitutional “right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” She  has long been known for her interest in meeting with constituents.

Gabe Zimmerman, the staffer who died in the attack, was her community outreach director, and helped her to organize town hall meetings and Congress on your Corner events, like the one they were attending yesterday.

ThoughtPossible.com :: In the wake of the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) and 19 other people, six of whom have already, tragically, died from their injuries, the national political establishment (media, pressure groups and elected officials) has turned its attention to the perils of extremist and vitriolic rhetoric. We are being asked to consider whether the use of metaphorical violence (putting Rep. Giffords in the crosshairs, which both Sarah Palin and her 2010 opponent did) leads to actual violence, and while direct responsibility is not being alleged, the ethical obligation to honor our democracy with civil discourse must be considered.

There is no question that specific individuals and specific organizations have very consistently ratcheted up the vitriol and hostility in our political rhetoric, for personal and partisan gain. Former Rep. Bob Inglis (R-SC) yesterday repeated his criticism of the last year of his party’s near religious commitment to extremist rhetorical distortions and misleading statements about Pres. Obama and the nature of the reform legislation he and the Democrats in Congress have passed.

He urged “even the staunchest Republicans” to have the integrity and the civility to say “We are all Democrats today, for Gabby”. And while civility has been the watchword, and we have heard outraged disdain for the shooter and for anyone who believes this kind of action is legitimate, in concept or in action, political strategists have already begun seeking to defend individual politicians and specific conservative groups against the rhetorical “attack” that their rhetoric has been too violent and extreme.

So let’s say it clearly and resoundingly, and let’s all say it defiantly, together: THERE IS NO CIRCUMSTANCE IN WHICH VITRIOLIC DISTORTIONS OR HATE-SPEECH ARE JUSTIFIABLE; THERE IS NO CIRCUMSTANCE IN WHICH THREATS OF VIOLENCE, METAPHORICAL OR LITERAL ARE EXCUSABLE.

People who have ideas and a will to serve have no time and no use for such disgusting distortions, and people of conscience know this. However heated political debate may become, metaphor ceases to be useful when it becomes outright distortion. Some politicians have chosen to view extremist distortions as politically expedient, even openly calling for armed rebellion, to capitalize on populist anger and anti-establishment feeling. But that political expediency comes with a cost.

One election may be easier to win if such ideas spread at the right pace over the right landscape, but the landscape will then become a distorted form of what we once hoped were its best aspirations, possibly in dangerous ways. False claims can turn out to hurt those who make them, when the fact that they were false finally gets through to the people whose votes decide the shape and direction of government.

To honor the principled, and always civil service of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, and the tragic sacrifice of her community outreach director Gabe Zimmerman, federal district Judge John Roll, 9-year-old Christina-Taylor Green and the other victims of this disgusting atrocity, let’s commit ourselves to marginalizing any public figure who uses lies, distortions, hate-speech, or the language of incitement, to defame his or her opponents and to manipulate the American people. Their actions are a stain on our democracy and a perversion or our country’s great spirit.

Let’s commit to being principled and coherent in our devotion to building a more perfect civil order, a system of debate and idea-sharing aimed at constructing pragmatic responses to real-world problems. Let’s commit to being better than any ideology, better than any tribalist camp, better than any Balkanizing defamation, better than the sordid temptations of internecine conflict that threaten to undermine the meaning and the quality of public service to an open democracy.

• CBS News: “Schieffer: Rhetoric and Its Consequences”
  (Says Violence Stirred by Inflammatory Political Discourse Endangers Our Way of Life)
• Huffington Post: “Our Leaders Must Renounce the Ideology of Political Violence”
  (The time has come for political leaders of both parties, whether liberal or conservative, to renounce the ideology of political violence. Ideas have consequences. The idea that “the guys with the guns make the rules” has inevitable consequences that can no longer be tolerated)
• CBS News: “Dem: Tone Down the Political Rhetoric”
  (Says Hoyer: Political Environment Getting Worrying, Attack on Giffords Is an Attack on Democracy)
• CafeSentido: “Former Republican Rep. Inglis says ‘We’re all Democrats today’”
  (Inglis: “I hope what even the staunchest Republican could say is, ‘We’re all Democrats today for Gabby,’ and let’s just come together as a nation and figure out a way to get out of these problems”)
• The Examiner: “AZ shooter is a nutjob, but violent rhetoric still matters”
  (“[I]t would be naive to assume that nutjobs are immune to the influence of violent rhetoric.  On the contrary, they are likely the most gullible, malleable, and primed to be incited to violent action.”)
• ThoughtPossible: “McCain Calls Obama ‘Decent Family Man’, Demands Civility” (2008)
  (“[McCain] called on his supporters to be “respectful”, said that’s what this campaign was supposed to be about, a respectful debate of the issues by two qualified individuals.”)
• CafeSentido: “Is Glenn Beck Deliberately Inciting Violent Acts Against Progressives?”
  (“Glenn Beck has a moral obligation to answer the question: what does he aim to achieve with this campaign of libel and incitement? Is he aiming to inspire desperate people to desperate action? Is he aiming to make ordinary people into desperate radicals?”)

Christina-Taylor Green was born on 11 September 2001, a day of national tragedy for the United States, and she died yesterday in Tucson, in a hail of gunfire, as a result of the assassination attempt against Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. Christina-Taylor was seen by her family as a sign of hope, something beautiful born in the midst of a terrible tragedy.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald:

Her mother said her daughter was aware of the inequities in the world. “She was all about helping people and being involved. It’s so tragic. She went to learn today and then someone with so much hatred in their heart took the lives of innocent people.”

Christina-Taylor’s father, John Green, told the newspaper his daughter had just been elected to the student council at Mesa Verde Elementary School and had been interested in politics.

Christina-Taylor went to the shopping mall where the shooting occurred with a neighbor who thought the 9-year-old girl would enjoy the opportunity to meet Congresswoman. What was supposed to be a warm and enthralling education in community-level civics turned into the tragic and inexcusable end to a promising young life.

SMH also reported “Christina-Taylor loved ballet, gymnastics, animals and, unsurprisingly, given her pedigree, was a keen baseball player – the only girl on a team called the Pirates, where she played second base. Her father is a scout for the Los Angeles Dodgers and her grandfather, Dallas Green, managed the Philadelphia Phillies to the 1980 World Series championship.”

Frank McCourt, owner of the Dodgers, said in response to Christina-Taylor Green’s death, “‘We lost a member of the Dodgers family today.” The 9-year-old girl’s death has added a perplexing layer to this tragedy, as the nation attempts to grapple with how to prevent firearms like the one used yesterday from destroying lives by adding such destructive force to the mental instability of deranged individuals.

Christina-Taylor Green will be remembered as an example of what is best in our nation, the hope that people of character and with strong minds will take an interest in the debate that occurs between people in the public sphere, and commit their innocence and their talent to helping to build a better future.

Speaker of the House John Boehner this morning announced he has directed the Capitol flag be flown at half-mast to honor the service and the sacrifice of Gabe Zimmerman, director of community outreach for Rep. Giffords. Zimmerman was a social worker before serving with the Congresswoman, and was engaged to be married. He is universally described as a principled public servant whose work was rooted in a deep personal kindness and commitment to the people.

Zimmerman worked for Giffords since 2006, during her first campaign for Congress. According to the Arizona Daily Star:

He started as a field organizer, became constituent services director when Giffords took office and later took on outreach duties. That job put him in charge of logistics for all of Giffords’ public district events. He helped constituents with day-to-day details such as Social Security checks.

He is being remembered as a committed public servant whose aim was to help the Congresswoman make genuine contact with her constituents, that her term of service be in part about hearing and supporting the voice of the people and a sign of what democracy at its best can be. Speaker Boehner also confirmed that the normal business of the House of Representatives will be suspended for the coming week.

Zimmerman was known for “going above and beyond the call of duty” and for being a committed and kind public servant. According to Politico, a local community leader, Pat Gould, remembered him fondly:

Gould broke down crying when POLITICO informed her of Zimmerman’s passing.

“He was such a very nice man,” she said. “Very receptive, very attentive, very concerned. He expressed extra concern about this autoimmune disease because he had a relative who suffered with one too.”

“Gabe was one of those rare people in high school who was nice to everyone. He was a friendly, outgoing, popular guy who was welcome in virtually every social circle. I can’t remember anyone ever having an unkind thing to say about him,” said Sommer Mathis, a high school friend who works at TBD, a local news Web site and sister publication to POLITICO.

According to AOL News:

Zimmerman helped Giffords’ constituents with their daily troubles, helping those who, for instance, needed help with their social security checks. He also was in charge of logistics for her public events, such the event Saturday.

“He would go out of his way to help people in trouble,” Daniel Graver, who worked for Giffords as a legislative assistant, told the Arizona Daily Star. “People would come into the congressional office, he would listen to them and give them money for a cab home.”

Other staffers wounded in the shooting rampage were Ron Barber, the Congresswoman’s district director, and Pam Simon, an aide who was known for her work with veterans. Giffords’ press secretary C.J. Karamargin said of Zimmerman, who organized the Congress on your Corner events and other constituent services for his boss, “He also organized town halls. He was an amazing person. His goal in life was to do nothing but help people. There’s not enough words to describe him.”

Family members and supporters are hoping Zimmerman’s legacy will be to serve as an example of the kind of humane and human-centered public service that our country needs, in contrast to the animosity and vitriol which posed a repeated and mounting threat to Rep. Giffords and her staff over the last year.

• For complete information on the shooting of Rep. Giffords, her staff and other victims
• Nothing Justifies Extremist Rhetoric or Violent Threats
• Christina-Taylor Green Born on 9/11, Died in Tucson Shooting
• Former Republican Rep. Inglis says ‘We’re all Democrats today’
• Rep. Giffords (D-AZ) Shot, Federal Judge Roll Killed in Tucson Attack

Former Republican Congressman Bob Inglis, of South Carolina, said the climate of hostile and vitriolic rhetoric that has overtaken much of the right is partly to blame for the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. Inglis urged his fellow Republicans to honor the principled public service of Giffords, saying “I hope what even the staunchest Republican could say is, ‘We’re all Democrats today for Gabby,’ and let’s just come together as a nation and figure out a way to get out of these problems”.

Inglis served on the House science committee with Giffords, and the two became friends. Inglis is familiar with the extremism promoted by overheated rhetoric. As reported by NPR:

By any measure, Inglis is a solid conservative. When he was first elected to Congress in 1992, Congressional Quarterly described him as revolutionary. He’s won six congressional elections and has a lifetime rating of 93 from the American Conservative Union.

Yet he’s become unpopular among his Republican colleagues for saying he believes in the science of climate change and for refusing to call President Obama a socialist.

He says the Republican party has been overtaken by a movement that seeks to redefine conservatism, but which operates through demagoguery, not service. Many prominent Republicans have adopted the view that it is politically expedient to promote, condone or even employ vitriolic distortions, but Inglis says “We’ve wasted a lot of time with saying things that just aren’t true about President Obama”.

Inglis was punished at the polls for speaking up for truth, civility and principled conservative service. According to NPR:

The attacks on Obama strike a chord with Inglis because he was part of a group of Republicans who went after President Clinton in the ’90s. Today, he says his attacks on Clinton were sins.

For Inglis, the gap between working honestly to serve the public interest and using a concerted campaign of lies to disdain and undermine the nation’s highest elected official is too clear to ignore. He now says his attacks on Clinton were “not healthy for my soul”. In November, he urged his party to recognize the need to work for consensus, and observed “It’d be better if we were pulling together rather than tearing apart.”

His words seem prescient, in retrospect. There is no place in true democracy for hate-speech, threats of violence, metaphors involving medieval acts, execution or bloody rebellion. People with solutions have no cause and no time for such wasteful and reckless words. Inglis says the extremist tirades of 2010 are like the bloodlust of the French revolution, a misguided violence doomed to collapse on itself. “And hopefully we get back as quickly as possible to the American struggle for independence,” he urged.

Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) was shot today in an assassination attempt during a public outreach event in Tucson. She was prematurely reported killed by CNN and NPR, but her status is listed as critical, and she is said to be “responding to commands”. The bullet reportedly “passed through her brain”. At least 9 other people were brought in for emergency treatment of wounds suffered. One 9-year-old child, a 63-year-old federal judge, and at least three others have reportedly died.

Sarah Palin had placed Rep. Giffords literally “in the crosshairs” as part of a campaign to “take out” members of Congress that supported Democratic reform policies. When asked to renounce violence and tone down her rhetoric, she refused, saying she wanted supporters not to repress their anger but to “reload”. The website where her PAC posted the infamous hit-list map was taken down today amid the firestorm of criticism.

The motive for the shooting is unclear, but major, local and web media, are speculating the attack was driven by the shooter’s opposition to Rep. Giffords’ political views. Supporters are asking conservative opponents of Rep. Giffords to denounce the violent act and demand full investigation of the political climate that led to this violent act. Gun control organizations are asking Arizona authorities to temporarily crack down on the sale of firearms in the state.

Federal Judge John Roll was killed in the attack. According to The Hill newspaper’s Blog Briefing Room:

The judge, U.S. District Judge John Roll, was appointed to the federal bench in 1991 by George H. W. Bush.

Roll had been put under federal protection last year after he made a ruling in a civil rights lawsuit.

In 2009 Roll ruled on a $32 million civil-rights case between illegal immigrants and an Arizona rancher in 2009 according to the Arizona Republic. Roll ruled that the case could go forward. After the ruling Roll was put under the protection of U.S. Marshalls after he [received] threats including over 200 [threatening] phone calls in one afternoon.

As of 4:20 pm EST, CNN is reporting that a handgun was recovered at the scene of the assassination attempt, and that a suspect is reported to be in custody. CNN has also been reporting on hospital reports that the bullet would was “through and through” and that the Congresswoman was “responding to commands”.

According to Dr. Sanjay Gupta, a CNN contributor, the impact, the bullet, internal trauma and the exit wound trauma could all contribute to swelling, and Rep. Giffords’ prognosis will depend largely on what kind of brain trauma and what kind of swelling in and around the brain, result from her injuries. Surgeons, speaking after an initial operation, said they are “optimistic” that she will recover, but could not

Capitol Police have released a notice to all members of Congress, saying they are working directly with local and state law enforcement, will remain at a high level of readiness and advising all members of Congress to be on alert and to take extra precautions. Sen. John McCain has reportedly said whoever is responsible for the shooting, whatever their motivation, is “a disgrace to Arizona, this country and the human race” and that this individual should suffer the most severe punishment allowable by law.

The FBI and Homeland Security are, reportedly, also working with law enforcement, and there is expected to be an exhaustive federal investigation of the events leading up to the shooting and into the affiliations of the individual suspected of the shooting. White House staff who were off for the weekend or who had left for the day have reportedly been called in to work, and Pres. Obama is expected to give a statement shortly to the press.

Rep. Giffords has been targeted violently before, due to her support for the Affordable Care Act. The very night the legislation was passed by the House of Representatives, 21 March 2010, a window was smashed at her district office. It was unclear whether the assault was intended to be a break-in, or whether it was simply vandalism. The Arizona Daily Star reported on the following day:

The front door was smashed out at Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords’ congressional office last night.

At 2:40 a.m., just a few hours after staff left the building after the late-night vote, the alarm system went off, said spokesman C.J. Karamargin. The panel to the front door and the glass panel alongside it were smashed out. The perpetrator likely had to hop the gated fence to get access to the door, since it’s not viewable from the parking lot.

Karamargin said it was unclear if the glass had been shot out with a kind of pellet gun, if it had been kicked or smashed with an object. The door has been covered with plywood.

In a separate incident, gunshots were fired into her Congressional office, prior to her winning re-election. Her opponent in the 2010 election held an M16-shooting event which he advertised to supporters as follows:

Get on Target for Victory in November Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly

Kelly had also posted an image placing Rep. Giffords in the crosshairs. According to TalkingPointsMemo:

Kelly’s website had also cross-posted a local news article that carried the headline “Kelly places the crosshairs squarely on Rep. Giffords…

CNN correspondent Jean Meserve reportedly told CNN her sources said the suspect is a white male, born in 1988, “which would make him 22 or 23, depending on his birthday”. It is not known if authorities believe the suspect acted alone, or whether they are investigating the possibility of a conspiracy. A number of supporters have suggested it must be investigated whether the suspect was linked to any armed militia group, or any group with white supremacist, separatist or anti-immigrant views.

Just this morning, at 12:29 am, the Sierra Vista Herald reported that Rep. Giffords was hoping to work with Republicans and to build a bipartisan center for responsible shared action on crucial issues. While she actively promoted progressive policies and supported Pres. Obama, she was not the most partisan or ideological member of the House of Representatives. Many are afraid this event could be motivated by misguided political zealotry.

Phone calls to the governor of Arizona are not getting through, allegedly due to high call volume, and the governor’s website still shows Gov. Brewer promoting the National Rifle Association (NRA), which has consistently promoted the unregulated sale of assault weapons and opposed any attempt to limit the sale of firearms of any kind.

Gov. Brewer finally spoke to the press at 4:59 pm EST, possibly waiting for a statement from the White House. She wept and called the shooting “an unbelievable tragedy”, saying “Gabby… is a friend”. She explained, when prompted by a reporter, that she got to know Rep. Giffords when she served in the Arizona state senate and that they had met often during statewide campaigns.

Gov. Brewer called the Congresswoman “a kind, hardworking servant to the people of District 8″ and said she was never an extremely partisan politician, that she was very gracious and always sought to work with others to promote solutions that would benefit the people she represented. She also suggested that whoever was responsible should be punished.

Arizona has been a focus of intensely heated rhetoric throughout the last two years, including active and coordinate campaigns of hate speech and calls to violence, on the part of radicalized anti-immigrant groups and armed militia. Gov. Brewer herself has repeatedly made flagrantly false statements in support of a measure designed to ban any interaction between undocumented immigrants and local communities or law enforcement, a measure which some have said invites narco-traffickers to flood the state with dangerous criminal rackets.

The 2010 electoral campaign season also saw a disturbing and dramatic escalation of both political rhetoric and of incidents in which threats of violence appeared to emerge from that charged climate. After a phone call he made in March, a San Francisco man who pled guilty to threatening to destroy then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s home if she voted for healthcare reform. And in July, a man was arrested after a shootout with police that was touched off when it was discovered he was planning mass murder of employees of two non-profit civil rights organizations.

According to DemocracyNow:

In a jailhouse confession, a California man has admitted it was Fox News host Glenn Beck who inspired him to plot the assassination of employees of the ACLU and the Tides Foundation. Byron Williams made national headlines in July, when he was arrested after he opened fire on California Highway Patrol officers. The shootout occurred as Williams was driving to the headquarters of the Tides Foundation headquarters in San Francisco.

UPDATE, 5:33 pm EST: CNN is now reporting that 6 people have died, and 12 others (including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords) were injured. Rep. Giffords is reported to be out of surgery and through in critical condition expected to recover. Her doctors are not willing or able to project her complete recovery, but she is reported to have responded to commands that show meaningful brain functioning on a number of levels.

Pres. Obama told the press that FBI director Robert Mueller had been personally sent to Arizona to oversee the federal investigation and to assist local law enforcement. The president also spoke personally to Rep. Giffords’ husband, a naval officer whom he praised for being “one of our valiant astronauts”. He said no expense would be spared investigating the crime.

He also added that while not all the facts were known about what motivated the attack or who was responsible:

What we do know is that such a senseless and terrible act of violence has no place in a free society. I ask all Americans to join me and Michelle in keeping Representative Giffords, the victims of this tragedy, and their families in our prayers…

UPDATE, 5:40 pm EST: Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) expressed outrage at the shooting and said that the last time he saw Rep. Giffords before the shooting, just two days ago, she was reading the First Amendment on the floor of the House of Representatives, “which includes the right to peaceably assemble” he specified. Rep. Giffords was shot while attending a meeting of members of Congress with constituents.

He said the shooting has no justification of any kind, and should “invoke the outrage of the entire nation”. He spoke of his friendship with the Democratic Congresswoman and said she was a moderate who was not politically extreme and who often worked with Republicans to build consensus.

UPDATE, 5:48 pm EST: At 5:46 pm, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) called for a moment of silence to honor those who died today, and to pray for the swift recovery of all those injured, including Rep. Giffords. The San Francisco Girls Chorus then sang. She expressed deep sadness and asked her audience to band together in somber recognition of the day’s tragic events.

UPDATE, 5:50 pm EST: Authorities have reported a 9mm handgun was recovered, “with an extended magazine”, allowing more shots to be fired in a shorter span of time. There are also reports emerging that websites linked to the suspect in custody list Hitler’s Mein Kampf as one of his favorite texts, raising further suspicions that extremist or white supremacist ties could be related to the shooting.

House Speaker John Boehner has issued a statement, saying he is ““horrified by the senseless attack”, and that “An attack on one who serves is an attack on all who serve”. Boehner has, in the past, been reluctant to reject the use of language verging on incitement to violence, actually calling for armed rebellion at one point in 2009.

The Tea Party Express said its membership were “shocked and saddened” and denounced the violence, saying such actions “have no place” in American democracy, and that the only clash between ideological foes should be “the clash of ideas”. The Tea Party movement had been accused throughout 2009 and 2010, especially, of using extremist, hateful and violent rhetoric. This is one of the first specific and high-profile renunciations of violent rhetoric by a leading Tea Party group.

UPDATE, 7:04 pm EST: More information is emerging about the alleged shooter, identified as one Jared Lee Loughner, described as a political extremist who may have previously met and derided the Congresswoman. Mother Jones is reporting:

The alleged assailant has been identified as 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner, an Arizona resident described by one eyewitness as a white, clean-cut man who reportedly called out the names of some of his victims as he began shooting. (The Associated Press identified the suspect, who’s now in police custody, as Jared Laughner, but the Arizona Daily Star, Politico, and other outlets have ID’d him as “Loughner.”) The suspect appears to have posted YouTube videos under the handle “Classitup10″ that rail against the government and talk of revolution and terrorism.

In one YouTube rant, Loughner is reported to have said “A terrorist is a person who employs terror or terrorism, especially as a political weapon. If you call me a terrorist then the argument to call me a terrorist is Ad hominem.” He accused the government of mind-control and brainwashing, and appears to have suggested he might be labeled a terrorist.

UPDATE, 7:27 pm EST: C.J. Karamargin, press secretary for Rep. Giffords, said that among the fatalities was Giffords’ director of community outreach Gabe Zimmerman. Zimmerman was a former social worker, from Tucson, who was engaged to be married.

UPDATE, 8:02 pm EST: Captain Mark Kelly, the Congresswoman’s husband, is scheduled to command the last scheduled mission for the Space Shuttle Endeavor, in April, and has reportedly been rushed to her bedside in Tucson, from where he was currently stationed, in Houston. His twin brother, also an astronaut, is currently serving on the International Space Station. Two years ago this month, Rep. Giffords herself became chair of the House Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics.

The NASA Administrator Charles Bolden issued the following statement this afternoon:

We at NASA are deeply shocked and saddened by the senseless shooting of Representative Giffords and others at Saturday’s public event in Tucson. As a long-time supporter of NASA, Representative Giffords not only has made lasting contributions to our country, but is a strong advocate for the nation’s space program and a member of the NASA family. She also is a personal friend with whom I have had the great honor of working. We at NASA mourn this tragedy and our thoughts and prayers go out to Congresswoman Giffords, her husband Mark Kelly, their family, and the families and friends of all who perished or were injured in this terrible tragedy.

UPDATE, 8:20 pm EST: The Pima County Sheriff, Clarence Dupnik, has just said, during a press conference, that “We are not convinced that he acted alone.” He said there is reason to believe the suspect in custody arrived at the location of the attack with at least one other person, but said that for legal reasons, the Sheriff’s Department would not yet be disclosing photographs or names. Sheriff Dupnik said his department is “actively in pursuit of” the second individual.

He updated the figures on casualties, saying there are in total 19 victims of the attack, with 6 confirmed deaths. The full list of the 13 surviving injured victims has not been disclosed.

Sheriff Dupnik denounced the “vitriolic language… the hatred, the bigotry…” of the recent midterm electoral campaign. He lamented that Arizona appears to have become the “capital” of vitriolic rhetoric, adding that ”We have become the Mecca for prejudice and bigotry.” Observing that most public officials receive threats constantly, he warned that “pretty soon, we’re not going to be able to find reasonable, decent people who will be willing to subject themselves to serve in public office”.

UPDATE, 9 Jan., 9:43 am EST: Local authorities have revised casualty figures for yesterday’s shooting rampage: 20 victims are now reported to have been shot in the assassination attempt against Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. 6 are confirmed dead; information is not readily available for all of the 14 people wounded in the shooting.

This morning, House Speaker John Boehner announced the Capitol flag would fly at half staff to honor the service of Gabe Zimmerman, director of community outreach for Rep. Giffords, a committed public servant well-known and liked throughout the local community, who the Speaker said “died in the line of duty”.

Speaker Boehner also confirmed prior reports that normal House business would be in part suspended for the coming week, while Congress moves to deal with the shooting, with security issues and to put off hotly controversial debates, so a period of solemn recognition could first take place. It is, at the moment, unclear exactly when the House Republican caucus will resume its campaign to repeal the Affordable Care Act, as Republicans and Democrats alike are calling for unity, collegiality and bipartisanship in defense of the serious work of public service.

UPDATE, 9 Jan., 1:24 pm EST: Rep. Giffords’ staff was hard hit by the atrocity. The Sierra Vista Herald is reporting:

With Giffords in critical condition from a gunshot through her head, two staff members injured and one dead, the rest of the staff just can’t figure out why it happened, Karamargin said.

“She’s always been so open, so accessible. She listened to her constituents,” Karamargin said, adding that what happened Saturday morning “puts the democratic process under attack.”

Observers, supporters and even political rivals, have been saying of Giffords that her service in the House has been an example of the best of what service in Congress is supposed to be. She reached out to constituents, made herself available, and took genuine interest in both the everyday needs and the policy views of her constituents. She worked with the other party and always was available to explain her votes and to learn how her service impacted the community.

A family friend who works at the hospital where she is being treated, Dr. Carmona, yesterday told the press he was hopeful she would survive, but warned that she had suffered a “devastating wound” and that numerous complications, and possibly further surgical intervention, could ensue.

Feb. 9, 2010 — "During a spirited bi-partisan Congressional leadership meeting, both the President and House Minority Leader (soon to be Speaker of the House) John Boehner speak at the same time." (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

The 112th Congress will be officially sworn in on Wednesday, and its work will be fraught with challenges and controversies from the very first. On Wednesday, for instance, the House of Representatives will vote on a rules change that will allow Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan to dictate spending priorities and caps to the entire House and Senate, by disallowing any revision of his rewrite guidelines, should the two chambers fail to reach agreement on a budget resolution. Issues like raising the debt ceiling, implementing START, mortgage and foreclosure reform and expanding medical coverage, will all pit liberal against conservative in a split Congress.

But December 2010, distressing for many ideological liberals and conservatives alike, was a tour de force in bipartisan compromise, with the president and the 111th Congress achieving major breakthroughs in tax policy, social policy, spending and nuclear security. That, together with the record Speaker-designate John Boehner built up during his first decade in Congress, of working across the aisle and using intelligent compromise to effect policies workable for both sides, hold out some hope that election year bluster might be just that: bluster.

Now, the responsibility to govern falls to Mr. Boehner, and his will be a very different set of interests from those driving the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell. While McConnell has sworn himself to the destruction of the Obama presidency, whatever the cost to the country, Boehner would be committing political suicide for himself and his party were he to engage in such a campaign of obstruction. He will have to find ways to work with the White House to craft policies that don’t give the president golden opportunities to make populist history with the veto pen.

President Obama and Speaker-designate Boehner are presently gearing up for a year of steep and deepening challenges. Some Republicans, like Sen. McConnell and Linsday Graham of South Carolina, have suggested recovery and reform may be in jeopardy, saying they will only work with the White House if the president does what they want. Yet, there will be intense pressure on Mr. Boehner to move the House in the direction of constructive action.

Sen. Graham told Meet the Press yesterday that the Republican plan to heal the desperately disordered housing market would be to privatize Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac (FMFM), the two government chartered non-profit corporations whose purpose is to make sure the dynamics of the private mortgage industry do not drive people out of their homes. He also said the GOP will raise the eligibility age for Medicare and Social Security.

Surprisingly, Sen. Graham went as far as to say that Social Security and Medicare payments should be “means tested”, which in theory means he supports eliminating payouts to more affluent recipients, long a progressive aim. How Sen. Graham intends to do this, when no one in Congress is willing to “cut Medicare benefits”, is a mystery, but one which serves to illustrate how precarious anything looking like solid footing must be in the 112th Congress.

What Graham seemed unwilling to discuss —and this has been consistently true of Republicans campaigning to cut spending— is how the 112th Congress will meet the challenge of rolling back Defense spending to sustainable and constructive spending only, cutting waste and prosecuting fraud and corruption. While this must be the single most bloated segment of federal spending, with fraud and abuse rampant and huge sums (in the tens of billions) literally “disappearing” in Iraq and Afghanistan, there appears to be no political will on the Republican side for such serious action to rein in deficits.

Graham used terms of political art, like “walking around money” to make it appear that the real spending problem is irresponsible day-to-day spending by the Obama administration. In fact, what he means by “walking around money” is spending not specified by earmarks. So, it appears we are in for infra-Republican gridlock, with the party opposing both earmarks and non-earmark spending. It also appears Sen. Graham’s tone, aimed at flippantly insulting the Democratic leadership, bodes ill for bipartisan compromise in the Senate.

This will ultimately hurt the Republican cause of rekindled conservative leadership, and pose a serious problem for Speaker-designate Boehner, who will have to turn to Democrats in the Senate to help him legislate responsibly. It remains to be seen if a Speaker Boehner will strike a more constructive tone, as the burden of history, i.e. the obligation to participate in government, falls on his shoulders.

The GOP has sought to portray its House win in November as a “mandate” to move all federal policy to the right. But polling suggests the real public demand is for more bipartisan compromise, which suggests a need to move the Republican House caucus to the center. New York’s new governor, Andrew Cuomo, has promised a governorship driven by “constructive impatience”, a term Pres. Obama might find useful in reviving the progressive populism of his 2008 campaign.

In 2011 and 2012, Obama will almost certainly need to make that particular rhetorical and policy shift, as he struggles to work with a split Congress and Republican House, which will see corporatism on the rise and ideological fundamentalism threatening to intrude into serious national priorities. Speaker-designate Boehner would also do well to think about “constructive impatience”: he needs the help of Democrats to secure his legacy as an effective House speaker, and he will need to stand astride the partisan center to get things done.

The 111th Congress saw the opposition party shift loudly and relentlessly to a strategy of constant obstruction, but it also saw historic Democratic majorities, led by a president who consistently added Republican ideas to major reform plans, produce more substantive reform legislation than any Congress since the 1930s. It was partisan, but also productive. The 112th Congress cannot do as well with such a partisan divide: it will have to be more pragmatic, more constructive, more governed by statesmanship and civility, if we are to heal the nation’s economy and move forward healthfully into the 21st century.

The following is a White House transcript of Pres. Obama’s remarks, as delivered in a signing ceremony at the Department of the Interior, 22 December 2010…

9:10 A.M. EST

THE VICE PRESIDENT:  Hey, folks, how are you?  (Applause.)  It’s a good day.  (Applause.)  It’s a real good day.  As some of my colleagues can tell you, this is a long time in coming.  But I am happy it’s here.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome.  Please be seated.

It was a great five-star general and President, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who once said, “Though force can protect in emergency, only justice, fairness and consideration, and cooperation can finally lead men to the dawn of eternal peace.”

By repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” today, we take a big step toward fostering justice, fairness and consideration, and that real cooperation President Eisenhower spoke of.

This fulfills an important campaign promise the President and I made, and many here on this stage made, and many of you have fought for, for a long time, in repealing a policy that actually weakens our national security, diminished our ability to have military readiness, and violates the fundamental American principle of fairness and equality — that exact same set of principles that brave gay men and women will now be able to openly defend around the world.  (Applause.)

It is both morally and militarily simply the right thing to do.  And it’s particularly important that this result was fully supported by those within the military who are charged with implementing it.  And I want to pay particular respect, just as a personal note — as we used to say, I used to be allowed to say in the Senate, a point of personal privilege — Admiral Mullen, you’re a stand-up guy.  (Applause.)  I think they like you.  (Applause.)

He already has enough power.  Don’t — (laughter.)

And it couldn’t have been done without these men and women leading our military.  And certainly it could not have been done without the steady, dedicated and persistent leadership of the President of the United States.  (Applause.)

Mr. President, by signing this bill, you will be linking military might with an abiding sense of justice.  You’ll be projecting power by promoting fairness, and making the United States military as strong as they can be at a time we need it to be the strongest.

Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States of America, the Commander-in-Chief, Barack Obama.  (Applause.)

AUDIENCE:  Yes, we did!  Yes, we did!  Yes, we did!

THE PRESIDENT:  Thank you!  Yes, we did.

AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Thank you, Mr. President!

THE PRESIDENT:  You are welcome.  (Applause.)

This is a good day.

AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Yes, it is!

AUDIENCE MEMBER:  (Inaudible.) (Laughter.)

AUDIENCE MEMBER:  You rock, President Obama!

THE PRESIDENT:  Thank you, thank you, thank you.  (Laughter.)

You know, I am just overwhelmed.  This is a very good day.  (Applause.)  And I want to thank all of you, especially the people on this stage, but each and every one of you who have been working so hard on this, members of my staff who worked so hard on this.  I couldn’t be prouder.

Sixty-six years ago, in the dense, snow-covered forests of Western Europe, Allied Forces were beating back a massive assault in what would become known as the Battle of the Bulge.  And in the final days of fighting, a regiment in the 80th Division of Patton’s Third Army came under fire.  The men were traveling along a narrow trail.  They were exposed and they were vulnerable.  Hundreds of soldiers were cut down by the enemy.

And during the firefight, a private named Lloyd Corwin tumbled 40 feet down the deep side of a ravine.  And dazed and trapped, he was as good as dead.  But one soldier, a friend, turned back.  And with shells landing around him, amid smoke and chaos and the screams of wounded men, this soldier, this friend, scaled down the icy slope, risking his own life to bring Private Corwin to safer ground.

For the rest of his years, Lloyd credited this soldier, this friend, named Andy Lee, with saving his life, knowing he would never have made it out alone.  It was a full four decades after the war, when the two friends reunited in their golden years, that Lloyd learned that the man who saved his life, his friend Andy, was gay.  He had no idea.  And he didn’t much care.  Lloyd knew what mattered.  He knew what had kept him alive; what made it possible for him to come home and start a family and live the rest of his life.  It was his friend.

And Lloyd’s son is with us today.  And he knew that valor and sacrifice are no more limited by sexual orientation than they are by race or by gender or by religion or by creed; that what made it possible for him to survive the battlefields of Europe is the reason that we are here today.   (Applause.)  That’s the reason we are here today.  (Applause.)

So this morning, I am proud to sign a law that will bring an end to “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”  (Applause.)  It is a law — this law I’m about to sign will strengthen our national security and uphold the ideals that our fighting men and women risk their lives to defend.

No longer will our country be denied the service of thousands of patriotic Americans who were forced to leave the military -– regardless of their skills, no matter their bravery or their zeal, no matter their years of exemplary performance -– because they happen to be gay.  No longer will tens of thousands of Americans in uniform be asked to live a lie, or look over their shoulder, in order to serve the country that they love.  (Applause.)

As Admiral Mike Mullen has said, “Our people sacrifice a lot for their country, including their lives.  None of them should have to sacrifice their integrity as well.”  (Applause.)

That’s why I believe this is the right thing to do for our military.  That’s why I believe it is the right thing to do, period.

Now, many fought long and hard to reach this day.  I want to thank the Democrats and Republicans who put conviction ahead of politics to get this done together.  (Applause.  I want to recognize Nancy Pelosi — (applause) — Steny Hoyer –  (applause) — and Harry Reid.  (Applause.)

Today we’re marking an historic milestone, but also the culmination of two of the most productive years in the history of Congress, in no small part because of their leadership.  And so we are very grateful to them.  (Applause.)

I want to thank Joe Lieberman — (applause) — and Susan Collins.  (Applause.)  And I think Carl Levin is still working — (laughter) — but I want to add Carl Levin.  (Applause.)  They held their shoulders to the wheel in the Senate.  I am so proud of Susan Davis, who’s on the stage.  (Applause.)  And a guy you might know — Barney Frank.  (Applause.)  They kept up the fight in the House.  And I’ve got to acknowledge Patrick Murphy, a veteran himself, who helped lead the way in Congress.  (Applause.)

I also want to commend our military leadership.  Ending “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was a topic in my first meeting with Secretary Gates, Admiral Mullen, and the Joint Chiefs.  (Applause.)  We talked about how to end this policy.  We talked about how success in both passing and implementing this change depended on working closely with the Pentagon.  And that’s what we did.

And two years later, I’m confident that history will remember well the courage and the vision of Secretary Gates — (applause) — of Admiral Mike Mullen, who spoke from the heart and said what he believed was right — (applause) — of General James Cartwright, the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs; and Deputy Secretary William Lynn, who is here.  (Applause.)  Also, the authors of the Pentagon’s review, Jeh Johnson and General Carter Ham, who did outstanding and meticulous work –  (applause) — and all those who laid the groundwork for this transition.

And finally, I want to express my gratitude to the men and women in this room who have worn the uniform of the United States Armed Services.  (Applause.)  I want to thank all the patriots who are here today, all of them who were forced to hang up their uniforms as a result of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” — but who never stopped fighting for this country, and who rallied and who marched and fought for change.  I want to thank everyone here who stood with them in that fight.

Because of these efforts, in the coming days we will begin the process laid out by this law.  Now, the old policy remains in effect until Secretary Gates, Admiral Mullen and I certify the military’s readiness to implement the repeal.  And it’s especially important for service members to remember that.  But I have spoken to every one of the service chiefs and they are all committed to implementing this change swiftly and efficiently.  We are not going to be dragging our feet to get this done.  (Applause.)

Now, with any change, there’s some apprehension.  That’s natural.  But as Commander-in-Chief, I am certain that we can effect this transition in a way that only strengthens our military readiness; that people will look back on this moment and wonder why it was ever a source of controversy in the first place.

I have every confidence in the professionalism and patriotism of our service members.  Just as they have adapted and grown stronger with each of the other changes, I know they will do so again.  I know that Secretary Gates, Admiral Mullen, as well as the vast majority of service members themselves, share this view.  And they share it based on their own experiences, including the experience of serving with dedicated, duty-bound service members who were also gay.

As one special operations warfighter said during the Pentagon’s review — this was one of my favorites — it echoes the experience of Lloyd Corwin decades earlier:  “We have a gay guy in the unit.  He’s big, he’s mean, he kills lots of bad guys.”  (Laughter.)  “No one cared that he was gay.”  (Laughter.) And I think that sums up perfectly the situation.  (Applause.)

Finally, I want to speak directly to the gay men and women currently serving in our military.  For a long time your service has demanded a particular kind of sacrifice.  You’ve been asked to carry the added burden of secrecy and isolation.  And all the while, you’ve put your lives on the line for the freedoms and privileges of citizenship that are not fully granted to you.

You’re not the first to have carried this burden, for while today marks the end of a particular struggle that has lasted almost two decades, this is a moment more than two centuries in the making.

There will never be a full accounting of the heroism demonstrated by gay Americans in service to this country; their service has been obscured in history.  It’s been lost to prejudices that have waned in our own lifetimes.  But at every turn, every crossroads in our past, we know gay Americans fought just as hard, gave just as much to protect this nation and the ideals for which it stands.

There can be little doubt there were gay soldiers who fought for American independence, who consecrated the ground at Gettysburg, who manned the trenches along the Western Front, who stormed the beaches of Iwo Jima.  Their names are etched into the walls of our memorials.  Their headstones dot the grounds at Arlington.

And so, as the first generation to serve openly in our Armed Forces, you will stand for all those who came before you, and you will serve as role models to all who come after.  And I know that you will fulfill this responsibility with integrity and honor, just as you have every other mission with which you’ve been charged.

And you need to look no further than the servicemen and women in this room — distinguished officers like former Navy Commander Zoe Dunning.  (Applause.)  Marines like Eric Alva, one of the first Americans to be injured in Iraq.  (Applause.)  Leaders like Captain Jonathan Hopkins, who led a platoon into northern Iraq during the initial invasion, quelling an ethnic riot, earning a Bronze Star with valor.  (Applause.)  He was discharged, only to receive emails and letters from his soldiers saying they had known he was gay all along — (laughter) — and thought that he was the best commander they ever had.  (Applause.)

There are a lot of stories like these — stories that only underscore the importance of enlisting the service of all who are willing to fight for this country.  That’s why I hope those soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsmen who have been discharged under this discriminatory policy will seek to reenlist once the repeal is implemented.  (Applause.)

That is why I say to all Americans, gay or straight, who want nothing more than to defend this country in uniform:  Your country needs you, your country wants you, and we will be honored to welcome you into the ranks of the finest military the world has ever known.  (Applause.)

Some of you remembered I visited Afghanistan just a few weeks ago.  And while I was walking along the rope line — it was a big crowd, about 3,000 — a young woman in uniform was shaking my hand and other people were grabbing and taking pictures.  And she pulled me into a hug and she whispered in my ear, “Get ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ done.”  (Laughter and applause.)  And I said to her, “I promise you I will.”  (Applause.)

For we are not a nation that says, “don’t ask, don’t tell.” We are a nation that says, “Out of many, we are one.”  (Applause.)  We are a nation that welcomes the service of every patriot.  We are a nation that believes that all men and women are created equal.  (Applause.)  Those are the ideals that generations have fought for.  Those are the ideals that we uphold today.  And now, it is my honor to sign this bill into law.  (Applause.)

AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Thank you, Mr. President!

THE PRESIDENT:  Thank you!

AUDIENCE MEMBER:  We’re here, Mr. President.  Enlist us now.  (Laughter.)

(The bill is signed.)

THE PRESIDENT:  This is done.  (Applause.)

END
9:35 A.M. EST

The Lame Duck session of Congress is supposed to be ineffectual and, well, “lame”, unable to get things done. It is even more the case in a year when control of Congress changes hands. But this lame duck session has been historically active and engaged. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell has been struggling to set himself up as a key leader by undermining signature initiatives put forward by the Democratic majority, but has watched idly as one after another major initiative passes the Senate and goes to the president for signature.

Today, after an historic day for Pres. Obama and the Democratic Congress, in which Obama signed the repeal of the military’s discriminatory “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, and the Senate unanimously passed major healthcare protection for 9-11 first responders and ratified the START treaty with 71 votes, McConnell took to the floor of the Senate to say his party never intended to deny coverage to 9-11 first responders; they simply objected to provisions in the bill.

22 December 2010 is a landmark moment in the history of the 111th Congress (the most productive 2-year Congress since the 1960s achievement of major civil rights legislation). The outgoing Congress achieved comprehensive healthcare insurance reform, major financial regulatory reform, a credit card-holders’ bill of rights, major infrastructure investments, in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, along with unprecedented funding for alternative energy sources and major student loan reform.

But this one day saw the historic repeal of the discriminatory (and some have long argued, absurd) military policy requiring gay service members to not reveal their sexual orientation, under penalty of swift and dishonorable discharge; it saw the passage (after nine long years without remedy) of comprehensive health coverage for 9-11 first responders, many of whom have already died from complications relating to their fire, rescue and/or clean-up work; and, around 3 pm Washington time, the ratification of a major new arms reduction treaty with Russia.

So, the lame duck session of the 111th Congress was, like the 111th Congress itself, one of the most fevered and productive in history. While Republicans successfully blocked passage of the DREAM Act and of the $1.1 trillion omnibus spending bill their own leadership had supported, and won a two-year extension of Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthiest of the wealthy, the Democrats and Pres. Obama achieved one after another policy of historic importance:

• The extension of unemployment insurance to families affected by the Great Recession;
• Extension of 16 major new middle-class tax breaks enacted as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009;
• The passage of a major new food-safety bill to protect consumers against contaminated food and industrial abuses;
• The repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell”;
• Publicly funded healthcare coverage for long-suffering 9-11 first responders;
• Ratification of the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with Russia;
• New stimulus spending to help continue the expanding economic recovery…

There are many more achievements, including today’s post-START round of judicial appointment approvals, long overdue. Pres. Obama spoke to the press today after signing the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell”, saying “We are not a nation that says ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’; we’re a nation that says ‘Of the many, we are one’… we are a nation that believes ‘All men and women are created equal’…”

The firmly grounded rational view Pres. Obama has always been able to exude when talking of the need for more openness, more tolerance and the defense of basic liberties and basic fairness and tolerance, served well today to make clear how wrong continuing the military ban on gays would be. He noted that “at every turn, at every crossroads in our paths, we know gay Americans fought just as hard — gave just as much — to protect this nation and the ideas for which it stands.”

The United States government is facing historic budget deficits. A wave of new Republicans are going to Washington, DC, with the idea in mind they will slash “spending”, “shrink the federal workforce” and reduce benefits for “entitlements”, i.e. social programs. What they do not have a way to understand is that the entire budget deficit crisis is a direct result of specific policies enacted by former president George W. Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress of 2001-2006.

Rand Paul, senator-elect from Kentucky, who has risen to prominence making promises to a Tea Party base that the media say wants more than anything to slash government spending. Paul told CBS News’ ‘Face the Nation’ today that he wanted to cut spending for social programs, establish the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest of the wealthy as a permanent feature of the American economy —despite their failure to create jobs— and hold off on cutting Defense Department waste, despite acknowledging this would be necessary to shrink the deficit.

Paul comes from a radical ideology that says that all government spending is inefficient. (One wonders if he will reject his government salary, on the grounds it has corrosive effects on the economy.) He offered not one single example of waste or inefficiency, but alleged the Obama administration had set about making itself an “enemy of business”, for saying those who commit crimes should be punished, so that markets are fair and law-abiding.

The plan the Republicans are putting forward would give the largest sums (proportionally far more than any other segment of the population) to the wealthiest of the wealthy, at a time when multimillionaires and billionaires have earned higher and higher profits and ordinary families are falling out of the middle class, in an historic wave of foreclosures and bankruptcies. The Democratic party is proposing a middle-class tax cut focused on the most productive segment of the American economy, and on preserving the rights and opportunities of middle-class families.

The American economy has been eroded by a decade of ill-advised plans, designed to make life easier for mega-corporations whose massive revenue streams are not enough to “meet expectations”, without a constant cycle of mergers and consolidation. Consolidation is seen as a smart move for a business aiming to “capture expanded market share”, but the view that consolidation is positive is egregiously short-sighted, because consolidation makes the wider marketplace sclerotic and inefficient, and strips consumers of much of their influence on the economic landscape that is supposed to meet their interests.

The Republicans need to move away from the billionaire-focused economic policies of the Bush administration. It is a fundamentally anti-liberal AND anti-conservative economic philosophy, and it is harming families, communities and small businesses and causing wages to fall, undermining our economic security. The fact is, a politics that privileges the most privileged economic entities over all others puts ordinary people, families and communities, at such a disadvantage that their ingenuity and hard work is no longer enough; their rights and opportunities are eroded as multinational behemoths capitalize on a pattern of consolidation-based growth.

The result has been a significant expansion of government spending, instigated by deliberately enacted policies of the Bush administration, which moved the budget from 20% of GDP to 25% of GDP. This does not demonstrate an ineffectiveness of public spending policy, but rather the ineffectiveness of Bush’s tax-cut policies for stimulating the growth of the private sector. Worse still, the basic underlying principle that is meant to justify the all-tax-cut philosophy, the two-pronged philosophy of wealth trickling down to everyone and of soaring government revenues, failed to play out.

That underlying principle was also shown to be massively ineffective. Yet the Republicans are now pushing an even more aggressive adherence to this radical ideology. It is radical, because it operates on ideological assumptions that are the root of its rhetoric and of the ferocity of its proponents, but those assumptions are just that, and have been contradicted fairly comprehensively by the economic trajectory of the decade of the 2000s.

What this year’s crop of Republican freshmen seem to fail to understand about government “spending”, perhaps more than any other freshman class, if we look at philosophical indicators in the rhetoric of the candidates and the bluster of nascent coalitions, is that 1) government spending is money given to the “private sector” (i.e. people and businesses who are not, in themselves, “the government”) and 2) “earmarks” are the Constitutional power given to Congress, with the alternative being vastly increased presidential power.

If the Republican rhetoric of the 2010 campaign plays out, two major things will happen in the course of the next two years: 1) sharp spending cuts will induce a downward spiral in local and national private-sector investment (we see this in communities where state and local funding has been slashed; further federal cuts will worsen the crisis) and 2) Congress will hand massive new spending authority to Pres. Obama.

Though there may be some hidden way in which this shows an implicit trust for the president’s sense of interpersonal and historic responsibility in dealing ably with fiscal crisis and generalized economic malaise, the more likely explanation is that the freshman class of the 2011 Congress simply does not understand the Constitutional meaning of their attack on Congressional spending authority.

Voters in 2012, however, will look with a less forgiving eye on Republican protests that “we did not understand how our philosophies would impact the economic fabric of the nation”. They will, instead, judge whether the Republicans in the House of Representatives 1) knew what they were doing, 2) acted responsibly, 3) committed to working with Pres. Obama and the Democratic Senate majority to solve the nation’s structural economic problems, and 4) whether they were honest in their intentions.

If the outcome of the Republicans rise in 2011 is perceived to be gridlock and a deepening of ongoing economic crisis, Pres. Obama is likely to see a shift back toward his 2008 agenda, in 2012. The Republicans may lose the ideological battle for a generation, if their tax-cut-for-billionaires philosophy again proves to undermine the security and prosperity of American middle-class households. Their intentions will be unimportant to voters, if their ideas turn out to be dangerous.

The Bush deficit crisis perplexes Republican freshmen, because they have been conditioning their minds to believe that Pres. Obama is a socialist and that tax cuts are the best way to fight socialism. They are wrong on both counts: first of all, Pres. Obama is not a socialist; he is an American Democratic president, committed to Constitutional principles and to the liberation of the middle class from declining wages and debt slavery. Second, tax cuts do not undermine socialist ideas; they undermine the effectiveness of both democratic government and middle-class capitalism, the failure of which leads to socialism.

History bears this out. When nations begin to fail, more forceful measures are implemented to rescue their economies from the corrosive impact of deep economic distortions. In Chile, the dictator Augusto Pinochet, who took power to prevent a slide into Scandinavian-style “socialism” ended up nationalizing industries and enacting even more forceful anti-market policies, in order to rescue Chile from the corrosive impact of a forced “free market” system that allowed consolidation and pro-wealth redistribution to threaten the sustainability of the nation’s marketplace.

Republicans have failed to notice so far that in many ways, they have a great ally in Pres. Obama, because cooperating on his reform agenda would allow them to liberate their party from the sordid policy record of the Bush years and to rebuild the vast middle class whose good sense and fair-mindedness they so long have proclaimed to be the most significant foundation for their core of pragmatic conservative ideals.

In 2011, they will begin to see two things they have not noticed in Pres. Obama to date: they will see him use a more forceful hand to negotiate with hostile House Republicans, and they will see him more engaged in constructive negotiation than they have imagined possible. It will be an opportunity for the House Republicans to contribute to historic reforms and the conservation of the American dream. Will they have the wisdom to take the opportunity? Or will they let it slip through their fingers?

The federal government of the United States is experiencing major annual budget deficits. Republicans have spent most of the last two years decrying “tax and spend liberals” for causing such deficits. But every penny of the current federal budget deficit is directly attributable to specific policies enacted under George W. Bush.

Pres. Barack Obama has demanded that the Bush-implemented bailout, the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) be carried out only with the requirement that recipients of the funding be required to repay every penny, with interest. He also demanded that Congress do the impossible —which they did— and pass historic healthcare reform legislation that would be deficit neutral. In fact, the Affordable Care Act is projected to significantly reduce the federal budget deficit over coming decades.

Yet the American Prospect reports that “Just under half of the current budget deficit is attributable to legislation enacted during the George W. Bush administration and a little more than half to the economic collapse and the government’s response to it.”Indeed, three specific areas of unfunded new policy caused a massive expansion of the federal budget deficit: tax cuts, prescription drugs and war spending.

During George W. Bush’s first term in office, the largest tax cuts in history were passed for the wealthiest Americans, erasing the entire projected 10-year budget surplus left to Bush by outgoing Pres. Clinton, two hugely expensive wars were launched and the Medicare Prescription Drug Improvement and Modernization Act of 2003 (MMA) was passed, which included a massive unfunded expansion of federal spending to pay for prescription drugs (Medicare Part D).

Those policies account for nearly 43% of the current budget deficit. The other 57% is owing to three major factors, each of which grow out of Bush-era policies:

1. The Economic Collapse of 2007-2008, which has led to the longest and deepest recession since the Great Depression, and which was spurred by an atmosphere of lax regulation and a wild-west mentality about financial speculation;
2. Government action required to halt the collapse and lay the groundwork for economic recovery (some of this was enacted under Pres. Obama, but none of Obama’s platform proposals had been intended to inflate deficits—quite the contrary, Obama sought to ensure all new spending would be paid for, a.k.a. “deficit neutral”);
3. Interest on the debt accumulated from nearly a decade of unfunded war spending, all of it initiated by Pres. Bush.

The economic policies of the Bush administration were a very deliberate, very pervasive attack against much of the economic infrastructure that had kept the United States strong since World War II. The expansion of Medicare to cover prescription drugs was considered by many an electoral ploy to help the Republicans —especially Pres. Bush— win in 2004, and it was welcomed on moral grounds by Democrats and progressives, but from the outset, many complained that the failure to find funding would eventually cause the deficit to swell to unmanageable levels.

Unfunded massive spending increases have been the hallmark of the last three two-term Republican presidencies: Nixon, Reagan and George W. Bush. The first Pres. Bush is widely considered to have fallen victim to those very policies, ending up a one-term president when he deigned to raise taxes in order to cover rapidly expanding budget shortfalls in the wake of Reagan’s budget-busting spending increases and the savings and loan crisis, a much smaller financial crisis than the credit collapse of 2008, which actually cost taxpayers far more.

The fact is: the economic “stimulus”, which was really not a short-term stimulus at all, but a long-term “recovery and reinvestment” reform, has been praised by most mainstream economists as following all the right lessons of the economic mishaps of the 20th century, but somehow not measuring up in scale to the massive response needed to fix the pervasive crisis, spurred in part by the widespread fictionalization of wealth that took place between 1998 and 2008.

The American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (ARRA) was not a massive unfunded splurge of wasteful government spending, but a very well thought-through response to deep investment deficits in public infrastructure, deficits which were actually contributing to the collapse of the larger economy. By directing spending to needed infrastructure improvements, clean energy innovation and tax breaks for small businesses and middle class Americans, in fact to 95% of all working Americans, the ARRA was designed to respond to the Great Recession by shoring up key areas of the economy for future expansion and by creating jobs that would help to reinvest needed capital into local communities and local businesses.

The central obstacle was not a flawed policy or even an insufficient funding platform to support recovery, but rather a triple threat of wildly overvalued banking assets, a desperately miscued state-level response of slashing local spending (undermining the effectiveness of investment from ARRA), and banks’ subsequent refusal to lend to credit-worthy homeowners and small businesses.

Pundits have been helping the Republicans blame Obama for excessive government debt and high unemployment, but though unemployment was under 7% nationally when Obama won the presidency in November 2008, it had already hit near 10% before any of the recovery legislation went into effect. Not one of those jobs lost during the first three months of the Obama administration was in any way connected to Obama’s economic policies.

In fact, Republicans openly stated, both inside Congress and in the media, that they intended to impede the passage of any recovery legislation that was not 100% tax cuts, believing they could hold up recovery long enough to pin the blame on Obama. Essentially, this was a political strategy that had nothing to do with sound economic policy (tax cuts are one of the less effective means of stimulating short-term spending) and much more to do with a desire to exacerbate the harm to the average American in order to undermine the Democratic party’s chances of getting credit for fixing things.

The jobs numbers alone, considering that the economy needs to add between 1 and 3 million jobs per year just to keep unemployment rates even (given population figures), show that Pres. Obama’s recovery efforts have been hugely successful. Most economists do seem to agree with the view that a second great depression was approaching and the response taken by Obama and the Congress did in fact prevent that worst-case scenario from unfolding.

The Republicans, on the other hand, have advocated persistently since the fall of 2008, and continue to argue now, even in their stump speeches, for the very policies the Bush administration had in place that led to this crisis. Leaders in the party, from Sen. McConnell and Sen. Cornyn to Sen. Vitter and Sen. Coburn, to Rep. Boehner and Rep. Cantor, have consistently argued that tax cuts need not be paid for.

They argue that extending the Bush tax cuts, one of the costliest and most counter-productive gambles in American history, would cost nothing, despite the very clear fact that it would drain $4 trillion of revenue from federal coffers over the next 10 years. Extending the tax cuts for the wealthiest would cost over $750 billion. Their argument against this criticism is: despite the fact that this will inflate the budget deficit, we will just say it does not.

These kind of intellectually dishonest policy shenanigans are the reason we are mired in the so-called Great Recession, with over 9% unemployment fully two years after the Bush-induced financial crash of 2008. Credit is still frozen for tens of millions and small businesses are having a harder time meeting expenses. A fuller, more robust and more well-informed recovery and reinvestment process is what we need now, which suggests Obama and the Democrats should have more time to reverse economic trends that have been running away from us for over 3 decades.

In his weekly address, Pres. Obama criticizes Republicans in the United States Senate who are obstructing passage of an emergency extension of unemployment and efforts designed to help steer capital to small business. “When storms strike Main Street, we don’t play politics with emergency aid,” he says. “We don’t desert our fellow Americans when they fall on hard times. We come together and do what we can to help. We rebuild stronger and we move forward.”

Obama said of the Senate Republicans that “after years of championing policies that turned a record surplus into a massive deficit, including a tax cut for the wealthiest Americans, they’ve finally decided to make their stand on the backs of the unemployed.” He explained that unemployment insurance is not “welfare” and that no one looking for work “would rather have a welfare check than a meaningful job that allows you to provide for your family”.

Seeking to distinguish between nearly a decade of economic policy, under the Bush administration, which was designed to change the way the American economy worked, and which led to the credit crisis of 2008 and the recession, Obama explained that “We can’t afford to back to the same misguided policies that led us into this mess,” adding that “most economists agree that extending unemployment insurance is one of the single most cost-effective ways to help jumpstart the economy.”

Why? Because, he explained, unemployment insurance “puts money into the pockets of folks who not only need it most but who are also most likely to spend it quickly. That boosts local economies. And that means jobs.” And when the dynamics of a local marketplace are more vibrant, because local consumer spending does not evaporate in the midst of a jobs crisis, lending to small businesses, expansion and job-creation, can all resume more readily than if spending were to grind to a halt.

President Obama’s address to the nation on the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, as delivered from the Oval Office, 15 June 2010

8:01 P.M. EDT

THE PRESIDENT:  Good evening.  As we speak, our nation faces a multitude of challenges.  At home, our top priority is to recover and rebuild from a recession that has touched the lives of nearly every American.  Abroad, our brave men and women in uniform are taking the fight to al Qaeda wherever it exists.  And tonight, I’ve returned from a trip to the Gulf Coast to speak with you about the battle we’re waging against an oil spill that is assaulting our shores and our citizens.

On April 20th, an explosion ripped through BP Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, about 40 miles off the coast of Louisiana.  Eleven workers lost their lives.  Seventeen others were injured.  And soon, nearly a mile beneath the surface of the ocean, oil began spewing into the water.

Because there has never been a leak this size at this depth, stopping it has tested the limits of human technology.  That’s why just after the rig sank, I assembled a team of our nation’s best scientists and engineers to tackle this challenge — a team led by Dr. Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and our nation’s Secretary of Energy.  Scientists at our national labs and experts from academia and other oil companies have also provided ideas and advice.

As a result of these efforts, we’ve directed BP to mobilize additional equipment and technology.  And in the coming weeks and days, these efforts should capture up to 90 percent of the oil leaking out of the well.  This is until the company finishes drilling a relief well later in the summer that’s expected to stop the leak completely.

Already, this oil spill is the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced.  And unlike an earthquake or a hurricane, it’s not a single event that does its damage in a matter of minutes or days.  The millions of gallons of oil that have spilled into the Gulf of Mexico are more like an epidemic, one that we will be fighting for months and even years.

But make no mistake:  We will fight this spill with everything we’ve got for as long as it takes.  We will make BP pay for the damage their company has caused.  And we will do whatever’s necessary to help the Gulf Coast and its people recover from this tragedy.

Tonight I’d like to lay out for you what our battle plan is going forward:  what we’re doing to clean up the oil, what we’re doing to help our neighbors in the Gulf, and what we’re doing to make sure that a catastrophe like this never happens again.

First, the cleanup.  From the very beginning of this crisis, the federal government has been in charge of the largest environmental cleanup effort in our nation’s history — an effort led by Admiral Thad Allen, who has almost 40 years of experience responding to disasters.  We now have nearly 30,000 personnel who are working across four states to contain and clean up the oil.  Thousands of ships and other vessels are responding in the Gulf.  And I’ve authorized the deployment of over 17,000 National Guard members along the coast.  These servicemen and women are ready to help stop the oil from coming ashore, they’re ready to help clean the beaches, train response workers, or even help with processing claims — and I urge the governors in the affected states to activate these troops as soon as possible.

Because of our efforts, millions of gallons of oil have already been removed from the water through burning, skimming and other collection methods.  Over five and a half million feet of boom has been laid across the water to block and absorb the approaching oil.  We’ve approved the construction of new barrier islands in Louisiana to try to stop the oil before it reaches the shore, and we’re working with Alabama, Mississippi and Florida to implement creative approaches to their unique coastlines.

As the cleanup continues, we will offer whatever additional resources and assistance our coastal states may need.  Now, a mobilization of this speed and magnitude will never be perfect, and new challenges will always arise.  I saw and heard evidence of that during this trip.  So if something isn’t working, we want to hear about it.  If there are problems in the operation, we will fix them.

But we have to recognize that despite our best efforts, oil has already caused damage to our coastline and its wildlife.  And sadly, no matter how effective our response is, there will be more oil and more damage before this siege is done.  That’s why the second thing we’re focused on is the recovery and restoration of the Gulf Coast.

You know, for generations, men and women who call this region home have made their living from the water.  That living is now in jeopardy.  I’ve talked to shrimpers and fishermen who don’t know how they’re going to support their families this year.  I’ve seen empty docks and restaurants with fewer customers -– even in areas where the beaches are not yet affected.  I’ve talked to owners of shops and hotels who wonder when the tourists might start coming back.  The sadness and the anger they feel is not just about the money they’ve lost.  It’s about a wrenching anxiety that their way of life may be lost.

I refuse to let that happen.  Tomorrow, I will meet with the chairman of BP and inform him that he is to set aside whatever resources are required to compensate the workers and business owners who have been harmed as a result of his company’s recklessness.  And this fund will not be controlled by BP.  In order to ensure that all legitimate claims are paid out in a fair and timely manner, the account must and will be administered by an independent third party.

Beyond compensating the people of the Gulf in the short term, it’s also clear we need a long-term plan to restore the unique beauty and bounty of this region.  The oil spill represents just the latest blow to a place that’s already suffered multiple economic disasters and decades of environmental degradation that has led to disappearing wetlands and habitats.  And the region still hasn’t recovered from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.  That’s why we must make a commitment to the Gulf Coast that goes beyond responding to the crisis of the moment.

I make that commitment tonight.  Earlier, I asked Ray Mabus, the Secretary of the Navy, who is also a former governor of Mississippi and a son of the Gulf Coast, to develop a long-term Gulf Coast Restoration Plan as soon as possible.  The plan will be designed by states, local communities, tribes, fishermen, businesses, conservationists and other Gulf residents.  And BP will pay for the impact this spill has had on the region.

The third part of our response plan is the steps we’re taking to ensure that a disaster like this does not happen again.  A few months ago, I approved a proposal to consider new, limited offshore drilling under the assurance that it would be absolutely safe –- that the proper technology would be in place and the necessary precautions would be taken.

That obviously was not the case in the Deepwater Horizon rig, and I want to know why.  The American people deserve to know why.  The families I met with last week who lost their loved ones in the explosion — these families deserve to know why.  And so I’ve established a National Commission to understand the causes of this disaster and offer recommendations on what additional safety and environmental standards we need to put in place.  Already, I’ve issued a six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling.  I know this creates difficulty for the people who work on these rigs, but for the sake of their safety, and for the sake of the entire region, we need to know the facts before we allow deepwater drilling to continue.  And while I urge the Commission to complete its work as quickly as possible, I expect them to do that work thoroughly and impartially.

One place we’ve already begun to take action is at the agency in charge of regulating drilling and issuing permits, known as the Minerals Management Service.  Over the last decade, this agency has become emblematic of a failed philosophy that views all regulation with hostility — a philosophy that says corporations should be allowed to play by their own rules and police themselves.  At this agency, industry insiders were put in charge of industry oversight.  Oil companies showered regulators with gifts and favors, and were essentially allowed to conduct their own safety inspections and write their own regulations.

When Ken Salazar became my Secretary of the Interior, one of his very first acts was to clean up the worst of the corruption at this agency.  But it’s now clear that the problem there ran much deeper, and the pace of reform was just too slow.  And so Secretary Salazar and I are bringing in new leadership at the agency — Michael Bromwich, who was a tough federal prosecutor and Inspector General.  And his charge over the next few months is to build an organization that acts as the oil industry’s watchdog — not its partner.

So one of the lessons we’ve learned from this spill is that we need better regulations, better safety standards, and better enforcement when it comes to offshore drilling.  But a larger lesson is that no matter how much we improve our regulation of the industry, drilling for oil these days entails greater risk.  After all, oil is a finite resource.  We consume more than 20 percent of the world’s oil, but have less than 2 percent of the world’s oil reserves.  And that’s part of the reason oil companies are drilling a mile beneath the surface of the ocean — because we’re running out of places to drill on land and in shallow water.

For decades, we have known the days of cheap and easily accessible oil were numbered.  For decades, we’ve talked and talked about the need to end America’s century-long addiction to fossil fuels.  And for decades, we have failed to act with the sense of urgency that this challenge requires.  Time and again, the path forward has been blocked — not only by oil industry lobbyists, but also by a lack of political courage and candor.

The consequences of our inaction are now in plain sight.  Countries like China are investing in clean energy jobs and industries that should be right here in America.  Each day, we send nearly $1 billion of our wealth to foreign countries for their oil.  And today, as we look to the Gulf, we see an entire way of life being threatened by a menacing cloud of black crude.

We cannot consign our children to this future.  The tragedy unfolding on our coast is the most painful and powerful reminder yet that the time to embrace a clean energy future is now.  Now is the moment for this generation to embark on a national mission to unleash America’s innovation and seize control of our own destiny.

This is not some distant vision for America.  The transition away from fossil fuels is going to take some time, but over the last year and a half, we’ve already taken unprecedented action to jumpstart the clean energy industry.  As we speak, old factories are reopening to produce wind turbines, people are going back to work installing energy-efficient windows, and small businesses are making solar panels.  Consumers are buying more efficient cars and trucks, and families are making their homes more energy-efficient.  Scientists and researchers are discovering clean energy technologies that someday will lead to entire new industries.

Each of us has a part to play in a new future that will benefit all of us.  As we recover from this recession, the transition to clean energy has the potential to grow our economy and create millions of jobs -– but only if we accelerate that transition.  Only if we seize the moment.  And only if we rally together and act as one nation –- workers and entrepreneurs; scientists and citizens; the public and private sectors.
When I was a candidate for this office, I laid out a set of principles that would move our country towards energy independence.  Last year, the House of Representatives acted on these principles by passing a strong and comprehensive energy and climate bill –- a bill that finally makes clean energy the profitable kind of energy for America’s businesses.

Now, there are costs associated with this transition.  And there are some who believe that we can’t afford those costs right now.  I say we can’t afford not to change how we produce and use energy -– because the long-term costs to our economy, our national security, and our environment are far greater.

So I’m happy to look at other ideas and approaches from either party -– as long they seriously tackle our addiction to fossil fuels.  Some have suggested raising efficiency standards in our buildings like we did in our cars and trucks.  Some believe we should set standards to ensure that more of our electricity comes from wind and solar power.  Others wonder why the energy industry only spends a fraction of what the high-tech industry does on research and development -– and want to rapidly boost our investments in such research and development.

All of these approaches have merit, and deserve a fair hearing in the months ahead.  But the one approach I will not accept is inaction.  The one answer I will not settle for is the idea that this challenge is somehow too big and too difficult to meet.  You know, the same thing was said about our ability to produce enough planes and tanks in World War II.  The same thing was said about our ability to harness the science and technology to land a man safely on the surface of the moon.  And yet, time and again, we have refused to settle for the paltry limits of conventional wisdom.  Instead, what has defined us as a nation since our founding is the capacity to shape our destiny -– our determination to fight for the America we want for our children.  Even if we’re unsure exactly what that looks like.  Even if we don’t yet know precisely how we’re going to get there.  We know we’ll get there.

It’s a faith in the future that sustains us as a people.  It is that same faith that sustains our neighbors in the Gulf right now.

Each year, at the beginning of shrimping season, the region’s fishermen take part in a tradition that was brought to America long ago by fishing immigrants from Europe.  It’s called “The Blessing of the Fleet,” and today it’s a celebration where clergy from different religions gather to say a prayer for the safety and success of the men and women who will soon head out to sea -– some for weeks at a time.
The ceremony goes on in good times and in bad.  It took place after Katrina, and it took place a few weeks ago –- at the beginning of the most difficult season these fishermen have ever faced.

And still, they came and they prayed.  For as a priest and former fisherman once said of the tradition, “The blessing is not that God has promised to remove all obstacles and dangers.  The blessing is that He is with us always,” a blessing that’s granted “even in the midst of the storm.”

The oil spill is not the last crisis America will face.  This nation has known hard times before and we will surely know them again.  What sees us through -– what has always seen us through –- is our strength, our resilience, and our unyielding faith that something better awaits us if we summon the courage to reach for it.

Tonight, we pray for that courage.  We pray for the people of the Gulf.  And we pray that a hand may guide us through the storm towards a brighter day.  Thank you, God bless you, and may God bless the United States of America.

END
8:18 P.M. EDT

The Gulf of Mexico coastline of the southeastern United States has been hard hit by the ongoing BP oil disaster, with catastrophic environmental damage, the collapse of the local fishing and shrimping industry, and tourism bottoming out in some places near zero, just as summer gets going. There is a moratorium on deepwater exploration and drilling, which is putting a strain on the job market across several states. A serious investment in renewable energy resources would build a more vibrant, more reliable jobs market into the regional economy and help prevent the environmental fallout of offshore drilling.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of early 2009, what many refer to as “the stimulus”, which it was not designed to be, is actually a long-term economic reform and investment program, designed to help steer major sectors of the US economy away from abusive practices which impose long-term costs (‘negative externalities’, in economic jargon) on society. So subsidies for destructive practices are rolled back while subsidies for sustainable practices and innovation-oriented enterprise are expanded. It includes the single largest investment in clean energy in US history, as well as a major investment in infrastructure.

What’s more, the ARRA is phased in over several years, meaning there is still money to be invested. The coastal region of the Gulf of Mexico could develop a highly lucrative, highly productive, clean energy infrastructure, designed to harvest wind, solar and wave power, without any need for incurring the environmental risks of deepwater drilling. With the rapid acceleration of the efficiency of clean energy technologies, the Gulf region could, like California or certain states of the Great Plains, become a net exporter of clean energy.

Why is this not being proposed as an immediate, aggressive, well-thought government response to the crisis involving BP’s blown-out oil well? For one, Republican governors have staked their political fortunes on refusing to cooperate with Pres. Obama’s economic recovery and reinvestment plans, so they have either rejected or sought to impede the spending of the federal money they could otherwise get through the Recovery Act. But there is also the pervasive influence of the drilling industry, from rig operators to oil services companies to the big oil firms like BP, who invest heavily in political campaigns.

Gov. Haley Barbour, of Mississippi, a Republican who has bet his political future on the notion that offshore drilling is the best, or perhaps only, way to go economically, has just about called on the media to stop reporting on the spill, alleging that reporting on the impact of the BP disaster has hurt his state economically. Barbour does not have a clean energy plan; he has opposed the spending of Recovery Act money in his state, yet he has requested federal help in dealing with the oil spill, even as he alleges there is no problem in Mississippi and seeks to blame the media and not the oil industry.

Barbour wants offshore drilling expanded and has put himself forward as something of a mouthpiece for big oil’s interests in the Gulf of Mexico, citing his state’s economic interest in attracting “investment” from the big oil firms. What Barbour has not been able to articulate is: why is he not in favor, then, of an economic recovery strategy, already available to his state prior to the spill, which would help Mississippi diversify its energy economy, produce clean energy, reduce the environmental threat from energy production, and create lasting new jobs?

In Louisiana, Gov. Bobby Jindal, also a Republican who has opposed his state spending any money from Pres. Obama’s Recovery Act, a flagrant act of political grandstanding that was specifically calculated to deprive the people of his state of the investment they needed in hard times, in order to make it appear that Pres. Obama was not addressing the economic crisis, has been playing the populist. But even as he attacks the federal government and demands more assistance, he blames the government for the actions of interests he has supported and whose support he has enjoyed.

The truth, it turns out, is not Gov. Jindal’s friend: he has been a staunch ally of big oil and even now is calling for more drilling off the Louisiana coast. He has no serious plan for energy innovation and no willingness to cooperate with the federal government’s most significant investment in clean energy in history, despite the many ways it could benefit the people of his state. In fact, Jindal has been one of the most persistent champions of BP and other drilling interests, both in Washington and in Louisiana.

As reported by Mother Jones:

[The] media’s panegyrics have ignored Jindal’s own weak response to the oil spill and his outsized role in promoting the kind of regulatory cutbacks and dangerous offshore drilling policies that are now wrecking Louisiana’s economy.

In February, 2006, while serving as a member of the GOP-controlled US House of Representatives, Jindal introduced the Deep Ocean Energy Resources Act. Passed by the House a few months later, the bill would have opened up the entire US coast to offshore oil drilling. States could override the law and ban rigs in their territorial waters, yet the law would let them share lease royalties with the federal government–a strong incentive to drill. Adjacent states would have little say in the matter (clearly a problem, given that BP’s spill has marred several states’ coastlines).

In fact, it is astonishing how closely Jindal’s efforts mirror the history of lax oversight and cozy relations with the oil industry that led to the specific situation of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Using language that is first of all not very legislative in nature and secondly either extremely naive or cynically aligned with big oil, the bill actually asserted that: “(4) it is not reasonably foreseeable that . . . development and production of an oil discovery located more than 50 miles seaward of the coastline will adversely affect resources near the coastline.”

The Deepwater Horizon well is located roughly 50 miles off the Louisiana coast, and Mr. Jindal is now reframing his entire political persona around the notion that this well poses and apocalyptic threat to coastal communities, to local ecosystems, the fishing and tourism industries, the habitability of certain areas and the economic wellbeing of the entire region. What’s more, some observers believe a spill further out would only have resulted in a wider swath of coastline being directly impacted.

Mother Jones goes on to observe that:

As Jindal was pushing to radically increase offshore oil drilling (while accepting more than $100,000 from oil and gas companies), there’s no indication that he saw the slightest need to increase government oversight. His stated governing philosophy is deeply anti-regulatory. In March, 2009, he said: “There has never been a challenge that the American people, with as little interference as possible by the federal government, cannot handle.”

The Jindal saga is common in Gulf coast politics: even now, Gov. Jindal continues to push for expanded offshore drilling, even as he pretends to be a fierce defender of the environmental and quality-of-life interests of the people living along the coast. He wants to have it both ways, to promote the unsupervised abuses of an industry that does not know how to protect the marine or coastal environment, while taking no responsibility for his role in bringing about this catastrophe.

It is this kind of political representation, one could argue, that has left the people of the Gulf coast region without an alternate economic plan to offshore drilling. Jindal, Barbour and many others have long seen oil money as easy money, ignoring the risks and downplaying the very real costs to society at large. But now, the people of the Gulf coast region are faced with a serious challenge to that way of thinking: there is nothing easy or reliable about the offshore drilling economic growth strategy.

What is needed is something new: state of the art offshore windfarms could be built in place of deepwater rigs. New advances in solar-voltaic power-generation technology make it as much as 100 times as efficient as the advanced state of the art over the last decade. The Gulf of Mexico’s strong undersea currents also make it a strong candidate for high-capacity wave-power generation. A combination of the three could make the region into a clean energy powerhouse, if only the political leadership could grasp the nature of the problem and the wisdom of such a solution.

The US Attorney General Eric Holder has announced a criminal investigation into the events leading up to, surrounding and following the explosion and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon offshore oil rig, and BP’s response. The investigation will look into the possibility of criminal wrongdoing or fraud in BP’s dealings with regulators and in connection with the information it gave the government to help craft a response to the disaster.

According to Reuters:

“We have begun both a criminal as well as a civil investigation as is our obligation under the law,” Holder told reporters after meeting with state and federal prosecutors in New Orleans. “Our environmental laws are very clear.”

Federal agencies, including the FBI, are participating in the probe and “if we find evidence of illegal behavior, we will be forceful in our response,” he said, adding that prosecutors had a “sufficient basis” to start a criminal probe.

The Justice Dept. has also ordered BP, Transocean and Halliburton, the three firms directly linked to the operation of the rig and its failure, to preserve all records relating to the project and the disaster. Reports throughout the ongoing disaster have repeatedly suggested a deliberate effort was made to issue misleading reports about the extent of the environmental fallout.

The investigation will look for potential violations of federal law relating to interactions with regulators, statements to Congress and cooperation with federal investigators, as well as possible violations of the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and the Oil Pollution Act of 1990.

Holder was firm in asserting that “We will prosecute to the fullest extent of the law, anyone who has violated the law”. There have been allegations there may have been friendly treatment of the project during the planning phases due to corporate ties to members of the Bush administration, though no such links have been mentioned as yet in discussions about the investigation.

Pres. Obama had requested the criminal investigation, and has vowed to make sure safeguards are put in place to prevent any such catastrophic accidents in the future. Obama has promised forceful reform to the regulatory mechanisms that afford the federal government oversight of such projects, including the breakup of the agency whose inaction and/or cozy relationship with industry many believe led to deep flaws in the Deepwater Horizon project being ignored.

In a statement from its Executive Director, the Sierra Club has said:

BP needs to be held fully accountable for the disaster in the Gulf. The company pursued drilling without having adequate response plans, putting lives and livelihoods at risk. The company should be fully prosecuted for its negligence and for any attempts to mislead the government about its disaster response plans or the seriousness of the oil spill.

This disaster did not have to happen. In its aggressive pursuit of profit, BP, one of the richest companies in the world, has robbed thousands of Gulf Coast residents of their livelihoods and has robbed all of us of irreplaceable resources like sea turtles, dolphins, birds, clean beaches, and fresh bountiful seafood.

BP may be in much worse trouble than simply facing huge fines or the criminal prosecution of individual executives or managers. There have been calls from both ends of the political spectrum for the US government to take control of BP’s American operations, at least temporarily, if the gushing well cannot be capped.

The UK’s Telegraph newspaper is reporting that, in addition to the newly announced criminal probe, “This weekend there were calls for the US to seize BP’s assets or place the company in temporary receivership if the leak cannot be stopped soon.” It now appears like the “best minds” working on the problem do not believe the well can be sealed before August.

BP’s CEO Tony Hayward has made matters worse, greatly reducing public sympathy for the oil giant by making callous and arrogant statements: first claiming that the worst oil disaster in history, threatening the entire coastal and inland ecology of five states, was “very, very modest” and now saying he would “like my life back”, that sick clean-up workers are likely only suffering from “food poisoning” and that “There aren’t any plumes” of free-floating undersea crude that has not yet reached the surface.

It appears the Justice Department investigation will have the broadest possible scope under federal law, as the Attorney General reiterated that any crime discovered would be prosecuted and anyone who violated the law would face prosecution. That leaves any act of fraud, regulatory evasion or obstruction of federal investigative action, from the planning phase through the day of the explosion and up through the entire clean-up, as a possible starting point for what could become a far-reaching prosecution across multiple firms and dealing with activities on multiple continents.

The US Justice Dept. will likely request the cooperation of foreign governments in connection with investigating internal communications involving key BP, Transocean and Halliburton, departments where there is purported to have been knowledge about specific structural flaws in the Deepwater Horizon drill rig. Lax regulators might also face prosecution, if it is shown they acted in a deliberately criminal way to collude with industry in cutting corners or misleading the government.

The Deepwater Horizon undersea oil well is now the source of the worst oil spill on record. The spreading slick continues to threaten coastal communities throughout the Gulf of Mexico region, and could destroy delicate wetland ecosystems. Rep. Melancon (D-LA) was choking back tears yesterday as he explained the grave long-term harm he fears will be done to Louisiana’s coastal wetlands, saying “everything I know and love is at risk”. BP, it appears, has not been able to determine whether or not its “top kill” operation has succeeded in stopping the flow of oil.

It is now estimated that between 18 and 39 million gallons of oil have poured into the Gulf of Mexico. This far exceeds the catastrophic Exxon Valdez spill in Prince William Sound, which was 11 million gallons. After the initial “top kill” operation had appeared to significantly reduce the pressure of the petroleum emerging from the well, BP has reportedly decided to do a “junk shot”, pouring refuse from tires, bridging materials and other materials into the well.

Video from the site appears to show there is still some mix of mud and oil pouring from the well, though it has been difficult to assess the exact composition of the material itself. A BP spokesman has reportedly suggested it may not be possible to fully overwhelm the pressure of the well in a safe way. With the official recognition by BP that the “top kill” maneuver had failed, the company said it will now work on ways to “contain” the flow of oil, until relief wells being drilled are able to relieve pressure, sometime in August.

According to the Christian Science Monitor:

After BP’s three unsuccessful attempts to stop or siphon the gushing oil, federal officials also appear to be shifting focus. They are subtly but repeatedly emphasizing that their efforts should be judged by the region’s long-term recovery – not on the immediate issue of whether they can stop the Macondo wellhead from leaking 800,000 gallons of oil a day into the Gulf of Mexico.

Addressing the situation in a statement Saturday, President Obama said: “It is as enraging as it is heartbreaking, and we will not relent until this leak is contained, until the waters and shores are cleaned up, and until the people unjustly victimized by this manmade disaster are made whole.”

It appears increasingly to be the case that BP misled authorities about the flow of oil pouring into the Gulf, and those false reports may have had the effect of scaling down the broader response for cleanup and/or containment. MSNBC reports that conservation biologists studying the video say they believe there are likely 2 million gallons of oil pouring into the Gulf on a daily basis.

BP has noted the severe challenges facing the latest containment operation. The BBC reports that:

The Lower Marine Riser Package (LMRP) will use undersea robots to slice through the damaged pipe to make a clean cut that can be connected to a riser, capturing the leaking oil.

However, BP said the operation had never been carried out at a depth of 5,000ft and “the successful deployment of the containment system cannot be assured”.

The hope is the new plan will show signs of having worked to contain the majority of the oil gushing from the well by the end of this week. But, critics have said the engineering does not exactly suggest that scenario is viable: if BP admits it does not believe it can overwhelm the entire flow of oil from the well, the remaining flow may eventually overwhelm the containment device.

Pres. Obama has expressed outrage, and has instituted increasingly aggressive monitoring efforts, but is faced with the hard fact that the US government does not appear to have the engineering expertise for this specific type of crisis situation. Regulatory agencies that would be able to obtain and distribute the information necessary to ensure the Army Corps of Engineers and other government agencies would have the technical expertise and training to stage an immediate emergency response had funding stripped throughout the last administration.

Pres. Obama may not be able to make that case, but it remains a very real problem for the administration, the American public and the environment of the Gulf coast states. The leaking Macondo well is now the site of the worst oil disaster in the history of the United States, and is expected to leak between 800,000 and 2 million gallons of oil per day until it is closed. The new estimates mean that roughly every 10 days the equivalent of the Exxon Valdez spill is released into the Gulf of Mexico.

The following is an official transcript of the president’s weekly address, as released on 1 May 2010…

Over the past few weeks, as we’ve debated reforms to hold Wall Street accountable and protect consumers and small businesses in our financial system, we’ve come face-to-face with the great power of special interests in the workings of our democracy. Of course, this isn’t a surprise. Every time a major issue arises, we’ve come to expect that an army of lobbyists will descend on Capitol Hill in the hopes of tilting the laws in their favor.

That’s one of the reasons I ran for President: because I believe so strongly that the voices of ordinary Americans were being drowned out by the clamor of a privileged few in Washington. And that’s why, since the day I took office, my administration has been taking steps to reform the system. Recently, however, the Supreme Court issued a decision that overturned decades of law and precedent – dealing a huge blow to our efforts to rein in this undue influence. In short, this decision gives corporations and other special interests the power to spend unlimited amounts of money – literally millions of dollars – to affect elections throughout our country. This, in turn, will multiply their influence over decision-making in our government.

In the starkest terms, members will know – when pressured by lobbyists – that if they dare to oppose that lobbyist’s client, they could face an onslaught of negative advertisements in the run up to their next election. And corporations will be allowed to run these ads without ever having to tell voters exactly who is paying for them. At a time when the American people are already being overpowered in Washington by these forces, this will be a new and even more powerful weapon that the special interests will wield.

In fact, it’s exactly this kind of vast power that led a great Republican President – Teddy Roosevelt – to tackle this issue a century ago. He warned of the dangers of limitless corporate spending in our political system. He actually called it “one of the principal sources of corruption in our political affairs.” And he proposed strict limits on corporate influence in elections. “Every special interest is entitled to justice,” he said. “but not one is entitled to a vote in Congress, to a voice on the bench, or to representation in any public office.”

In the wake of the recent Supreme Court ruling, we face a similar challenge. That’s why it’s so important that Congress consider new reforms to prevent corporations and other special interests from gaining even more clout in Washington. And almost all of these reforms are designed to bring new transparency to campaign spending. They are based on the principle espoused by former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis – that sunlight is the best disinfectant.

Shadowy campaign committees would have to reveal who’s funding their activities to the American people. And when corporations and other special interests take to the airwaves, whoever is running and funding the ad would have to appear in the advertisement and claim responsibility for it – like a company’s CEO or an organization’s biggest contributor. This will mean citizens can evaluate the claims in these ads with information about an organization’s real motives.

We know how important this is. We’ve all seen groups with benign-seeming names sponsoring television commercials that make accusations and assertions designed to influence the public debate and sway voters’ minds. Now, of course every organization has every right in this country to make their voices heard. But the American people also have the right to know when some group like “Citizens for a Better Future” is actually funded entirely by “Corporations for Weaker Oversight.”

In addition, these reforms would address another troubling aspect of the Supreme Court’s ruling. Under the bill Congress will consider, we’ll make sure that foreign corporations and foreign nationals are restricted from spending money to influence American elections, just as they were in the past – even through U.S. subsidiaries. And we’d keep large contractors that receive taxpayer funds from interfering in our elections as well, to avoid the appearance of corruption and the possible misuse of tax dollars.

Now, we can expect that these proposed changes will be met with heavy resistance from the special interests and their supporters in Congress. But I’m calling on leaders in both parties to resist these pressures. For what we are facing is no less than a potential corporate takeover of our elections. And what is at stake is no less than the integrity of our democracy. This shouldn’t be a Democratic issue or a Republican issue. This is an issue that goes to whether or not we will have a government that works for ordinary Americans – a government of, by, and for the people. That’s why these reforms are so important. And that’s why I’m going to fight to see them passed into law.

Thanks so much.