issue: Politics

Obama Has Demoted Liberty

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

President Barack Obama has demoted liberty and democracy as primary U.S. foreign policy goals, at least where the Middle East is concerned.  So the president informed the world in his address to the United Nations last week.

Obama said four “core interests” would henceforth guide U.S. policy toward the Middle East and North Africa: protecting our allies, ensuring the flow of oil, fighting anti-American terrorists, and preventing the use of weapons of mass destruction. While he said U.S. efforts to “promote democracy, human rights, and open markets” will continue, they are now relegated explicitly to the second tier of U.S. interests.

Not so fast Mr. President. Shouldn’t Democrats at least be questioning Obama’s logic, if not raising objections?  After all, the president’s embrace of realpolitik is at odds with the party’s liberal internationalist outlook, which on balance has served America and the world well for seven decades.

Continue reading at CNN.

Creating jobs: Democrats need to stop business bashing and praise corporate investors

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Economic calamity begets radical politics. America’s worst financial panic and recession since the 1930s gave birth to the tea party and Occupy Wall Street. Now Occupy seems to be fizzling out, but tea party Republicans are plunging America into budget crises this fall.

The GOP’s surrender to fiscal anarchism gives President Obama and his party an opportunity to seize the high ground on jobs and economic growth. For that to happen, however, Democrats will need to eschew ritual business-bashing, embrace the productive forces in U.S. society and honor companies that are investing in America’s future.

The nation’s job drought is really an investment drought. Real government spending on productive assets from highways and bridges to computer equipment (net of depreciation) is down by half compared to the average level of the 2000s. Private sector investment is doing better but still falls well short of what the country needs. Many companies are still hoarding cash — about $2 trillion — or spending it on stock buy-backs, and investment outside of housing remains 20 percent below its long-term trend.

But many companies are investing at home. For the second year running, the Progressive Policy Institute has ranked the top 25 companies that are making the biggest bets on America’s economic future. These “Investment Heroes” invested nearly $150 billion last year in new plants, buildings and equipment (figures do not include investments in research and human capital).

Continue reading at the San Jose Mercury News.

Why Boehner’s to Blame

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The government of the United States of America is closed for business today, courtesy of the Republican Party. It’s a national embarrassment, like a scene from the Marx Brothers’ classic 1933 satire “Duck Soup,” only without the anarchic humor.

Hail Freedonia!

Who produced today’s farce? Was it the Tea Party hotheads, 50 or so House Republicans who love ideological combat but hate governing? Or was it Sen. Ted Cruz, perhaps the most cunning demagogue America has produced since Joe McCarthy?

All played their discreditable parts. But the man in the director’s chair is John Boehner, who is bidding for the title of worst House speaker in U.S. history.

Why Boehner? Because he knows better, and could have prevented the shut-down. And because, as America’s third-ranking constitutional officer, after the President and vice president, he is supposed to serve America’s interests — not the febrile demands of his party’s most rabid partisans. That’s Eric Cantor’s job.
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Read the entire piece at the New York Daily News.

The New Politics of Production: A Progressive High-Growth Strategy

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute
Will Marshall’s piece, excerpted here, was part of the Policy Network’s recent publication “Progressive Politics after the Crash: Governing from the Left.”

The US is struggling to find a way out of overlapping economic crises. One is cyclical: a painfully slow, jobless recovery from a recession magnified by the 2008 financial crash. The other is structural: US economic output and job growth have fallen well off the pace of previous decades. Although liberal commentators seem preoccupied with rising inequality, America’s fundamental economic problem is slow growth.

Even before the recession struck, the once-mighty American job machine was sputtering. Between 2000 and 2007, the US posted its worst job creation record in any decade since the Great Depression. Not only have many good jobs vanished, but also real wages have fallen or turned stagnant for all but the top US earners.

Overall economic growth has been declining steadily since the halcyon years after World War II, when the babies boomed and GDP grew at a robust average of 4 per cent per year. National output fell to 3 per cent during the 1970s and 1980s, before picking up in the late 1990s. Since 2000, the economy has downshifted again, averaging under 2 per cent growth per year. Research from the Kauffman Foundation also suggests a loss of entrepreneurial verve. The number of business start-ups, which Kauffman says generate most of US net job growth, has plummeted by about a quarter since 2006.

If there is a bright spot in the US economy, it is the rebound of corporate profits and stock prices since 2009. Yet these gains also highlight a stark inequity: returns to capital are up, but returns to labour are down.

In President Kennedy’s day, US prosperity really did lift all boats. Today, however, productivity gains do not automatically translate into higher pay for workers, especially people with middling skills. ‘This is America’s largest economic challenge’, says the economist Robert J.  Shapiro. ‘People can no longer depend on rising wages and salaries when the economy expands.’

Amid such dismal conditions, Obama’s re-election by a comfortable margin (5 million votes) was an astounding political feat. Despite Republican challenger Mitt Romney’s claims that Obama fumbled the recovery, swing voters credited the president with having prevented the economy from capsizing during the perfect storm of 2008–9. It helped too that Romney offered no theory of his own for rekindling growth beyond hackneyed calls for lower taxes and regulation.

Unfortunately, little has happened since Obama’s victory to dispel the pall of economic pessimism that hangs over America. A late spring poll, for example, found that nearly 60 per cent of Americans worry about ‘falling out of (their) current economic class over the next few years’. No doubt subpar job growth is chiefly responsible for such unwonted gloom. According to preliminary figures, the number of people with jobs grew by only 28,000 (0.02 per cent) during Obama’s first term.

And there is little relief in sight. The Congressional Budget Office forecasts weak GDP growth and abnormally high unemployment persisting to the end of Obama’s second term. America is stuck in a slow-growth rut. While liberal Keynesians are calling for more shortterm spending to kick-start the pace of recovery, what progressives really need is a bolder plan for overcoming structural impediments to more robust growth.

Instead of devising one, Obama is bogged down in Washington’s endless trench warfare over taxes, spending and debt. True, the president won a tactical victory in averting the ‘fiscal cliff ’ and forcing Republicans to swallow higher tax rates on wealthy households. Yet this modest blow for tax fairness did little to fix the nation’s debt or stimulate growth. In fact, distributional politics distracts progressives from a truly historic opportunity to lay new foundations for US prosperity in the twenty-first century.

To inspire hope for such a change, the US president must broaden his message from fairness to growth: he must put America back on a highgrowth path. By setting audacious goals – say, doubling the growth rate and halving unemployment by the end of his second term – Obama
would convey the requisite sense of national urgency

A clarion call for renewed growth would create political space for progressive initiatives – public investments in training and education, broad tax reform – intended to spread economic gains more widely. And, by fanning hopes for a reversal of America’s economic decline, such a call could help Democrats make inroads among white working-class voters.

These voters, once the backbone of Democrats’ New Deal–Great Society coalition, have since defected en masse to the Republican camp. A conscious campaign to start winning them back, while retaining the Democrats’ strong advantages with young and minority voters, is the key to building a durable progressive majority and ending the 50:50 polarisation that has paralysed Washington.

Read the entire piece by Will Marshall.

The Atlantic: It’s Time for a New United Nations

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In March of 2011 and just hours before the United Nations Security Council vote, Libyan dictator Muammar Ghaddafi promised citizens of Benghazi–his own countrymen–that he was “coming tonight” and that would show them “no mercy and no pity.” Gaddafi’s brazen statement telegraphed an impending attack with a high possibility massive civilian casualties.

In the Security Council immediately following Gaddafi’s threats, Russia and China–two permanent members with noted authoritarian governments themselves–abstained from voting on resolution 1973, which authorized “all necessary measures to protect civilians… including Benghazi.” (Germany, Brazil, and India, then-rotating members of the Security Council, abstained as well for their own reasons.)

In hindsight, Russia seems to have regretted its abstention. In January 2012, speaking about the growing civil war in Syria, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told Australian TV that “the international community unfortunately did take sides in Libya and we would never allow the Security Council to authorize anything similar to what happened in Libya” in Syria.

That seems odd, because “what happened in Libya” was, on balance, a good thing: A sustained NATO air campaign unquestionably protected many more innocent civilians than it harmed and weakened Gaddafi’s forces en route to his downfall. What’s more, the Libya operation served as validation for those supporting the “responsibility to protect,” a 2006 Security Council mandate that called on parties involved in armed conflict to bear primary responsibility to protect civilians, approved by a unanimous 15-0 vote.

Continue reading at the Atlantic.

Foreign Policy: Absent Without Leave

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In the late 1960s, Britain signaled the end of its long run as a world power by withdrawing from major military bases east of the Suez Canal. Today, as the White House confronts the crisis in Syria, could America be facing its own “east of Suez” moment?

The historical parallels aren’t exact. Britain was an empire; the United States isn’t — despite the tendentious polemics of inveterate anti-Americans, from Noam Chomsky to Glenn Greenwald. Britain had already been surpassed by bigger superpowers by the 1960s. That hasn’t happened to America and isn’t likely to happen in the foreseeable future. But the debate over intervention in Syria has illuminated large and growing cracks in the internationalist consensus that has underpinned U.S. global leadership since World War II.

That consensus has been strained to a breaking point by feral partisanship and by a Republican Party increasingly in thrall to libertarian ideas. As a skeptical Congress awaits a possible vote on President Barack Obama’s proposal to use military force against Bashar al-Assad’s regime, the big question is whether the United States can still muster the internal cohesion to play a decisive role in world affairs.

In his prime-time address Sept. 10, Obama asked Congress to postpone the vote pending a possible deal with Russia that would transfer Syria’s chemical arsenal to international custody. The scheme could spare Obama the embarrassment of being rebuffed by Congress, where sentiment against a U.S. strike has been hardening. But the fact that Russian President Vladimir Putin, Assad’s enabler and the U.S. president’s tormentor in chief, is the one throwing Obama a political lifeline should give us pause about the deal’s merits. To be sure, the deal would be good for Obama, allowing him to boast that his threat to use force compelled Assad to give up his chemical weapons. It might also earn Putin a Nobel Peace Prize. But it won’t end the agony of the Syrian people, because it would leave Assad free to go right on killing them with conventional weapons.

If Washington forswears the use of force against Syria, as Putin is demanding, it will have paid a very high price for reinforcing the norm against chemical warfare. The Russian gambit, moreover, may founder on its sheer impracticality: Will Assad, his back to the wall, really give up his most fearsome weapon? And how will U.N. weapons inspectors be able to find and remove all the regime’s chemical weapons in the middle of a war zone? Even from a purely logistical standpoint, the Russian proposal may be close to impossible.

Read the piece at Foreign Policy.

RealClearWorld: A Tipping Point in Syria?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

As political violence engulfs the Middle East, the White House seems to sink deeper into incoherence and passivity. Will reports of a massive chemical attack on Syrian civilians finally rouse President Obama from his torpor, or will they become just the latest outrage du jour in the region’s never-ending horror show?

The Syrian opposition claimed that forces loyal to Syrian dictator Bashar Assad used chemical weapons to kill over 1,000 civilians in the Ghouta suburb of Damascus. Buttressing these reports were harrowing videos of people struggling to breath and photos of scores of bodies that born no outward signs of injury. If confirmed, the poison gas attack would put Assad in the same league as Iraq‘s Saddam Hussein, who used chemical bombs to wipe out 5,000 Kurds in the town of Halabja in 1988.

The alleged massacre coincides with the arrival in Syria of a UN team charged with investigating reports that the regime unleashed small-scale chemical attacks against opponents last spring. The timing suggests how little Assad worries about crossing the “red line” President Obama has drawn against the use of chemical weapons. Or perhaps it’s a veiled warning about what he’s prepared to do if Western powers intervene in Syria.

Although warmly applauded by foreign policy “realists,” the administration’s resolve to stand aloof from crisis has been a strategic and moral failure. What began as a civil uprising has morphed into something worse: a full-fledged proxy war that is inflaming the region’s sectarian divisions. As Shia Iran and Hezbollah fight to save their ally Assad, Sunni jihadis — some marching under the banner of al Qaeda – are pouring into Syria. This makes it easier for Assad to posture as a protector of Alawite and Christian minorities and a bulwark against the very Salafist terrorists that keep U.S. intelligence agencies awake at night.

But this is emphatically not a case of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” America has no interest in the survival of a homicidal tyrant and war criminal like Assad, even if his fall presents openings to Sunni extremists in Syria. And in truth, the United States isn’t very good — thankfully — at the kind of cold blooded realpolitik that counsels standing by while Assad, Iran and Hezbollah and Sunni fanatics bleed each other in Syria.

Continue reading at RealClearWorld.

Tax Reform: Make It Simple

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Our tax code is broken. It’s a simple fact that nearly everyone agrees on, yet year after year our government leaders fail to address it. Meanwhile, the consequences of the overly complex and poorly designed system are felt by middle-class families and entrepreneurs. They benefit little from the existing array of incentives and loopholes, which are mainly targeted to special interests and the wealthy.

However, the hard work of tax reform is now underway. House Ways & Means Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) are barnstorming the country to hear directly from Americans – learning first-hand about the inefficiencies of the current system, and how taxpayers will be impacted by an array of proposed reforms.

Ultimately, the most likely feedback they will hear is the need for simplification of a system that has simply grown too complex for most Americans to understand, with damaging consequences to the nation’s economy. The tax code’s byzantine complexity costs business and individuals hundreds of billions in compliance. The IRS’s National Taxpayer Advocate estimated that individual and business taxpayers spend 6.1 billion hours to complete filings. This is money and time wasted.

Continue reading at The Hill’s Congress Blog.

SCOTUS on Voting Rights: It had to happen sometime

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Many liberals are outraged over this week’s Supreme Court decision striking down parts of the Voting Rights Act. They’re accusing the Court’s conservative majority of dissing Martin Luther King, who 50 years ago this summer led the epochal March on Washington; burying the Great Society’s noble quest for racial justice; and, resurrecting the noxious old doctrine of “states’ rights.”

Of course, it’s galling to hear conservatives—who didn’t object much to the systematic violation of black citizens’ Constitutional rights in the bad old days—extol the ruling as a victory for “Constitutionalism” over federal meddling. And Republicans’ undiminished enthusiasm for “Voter ID” and other blatant voter suppression ploys shows that the battle to guarantee full and equal access to the ballot is far from over.

The ruling also makes a mockery of conservatives’ professed reverence for “judicial restraint.” In striking down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, the Roberts majority showed exactly zero deference to Congress, which in 2006 renewed the law for another quarter century by a 98-0 vote in the Senate and a 390-33 vote in the House.

Nonetheless, I confess to being torn by the ruling and finding the left’s indignation somewhat hyberbolic. Having grown up in the Jim Crow South, I know that the states covered by the 1965 Act richly deserved to have Washington supervise their voting procedures. Otherwise, they would have continued to use every scurvy trick in the book to prevent black citizens from exercising their right to vote. Continue reading “SCOTUS on Voting Rights: It had to happen sometime” →

A Test of Republican Loyalties

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

How much do congressional Republicans hate Obamacare? How determined are they to see it fail?

We may soon find out. For the first time, a constituency group to whom the GOP normally pays close attention—religious institutions—is asking for a legislative “fix” of the Affordable Care Act to make it work as intended. If the recent past is any indication, conservatives will resist any such effort on grounds that Obamacare must be repealed root and branch, not repaired or reformed.

Months of outreach to Republican Senate offices by religious leaders have yielded no official GOP support to an appeal from a broad coalition of religious denominations to ensure that church-sponsored health plans can participate in the ACA’s health insurance exchanges. Worse yet, from a partisan Republican point of view, two Democratic senators, Mark Pryor and Chris Coons, were the first responders to this call, introducing legislation late last week. Pryor is widely viewed as the GOP’s number one senatorial target in 2014.

Without the requested “fix,” as many as one million clergy members and church employees now enrolled in church-sponsored health plans could soon face the choice of leaving these plans (designed to meet their unique needs, such as the frequent reassignment of clergy across state lines) or losing access to the tax subsidies provided by the ACA to help lower-to-middle income Americans purchase insurance. Continue reading “A Test of Republican Loyalties” →

Immigration Reform and the Growing Asian-American Vote

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The poor showing of the G.O.P. among Latino voters in 2012 is the political subtext for much of the immigration debate in Congress this week. But Republicans also consider the impact of their words and deeds on the nation’ s fastest growing demographic: Asian-American voters, who are at least as invested in the immigration issue as Latinos.

As recently as the early 1990s, many Republicans considered the Asian-American population to be a “natural constituency” for their party, given the traditionalist social views, entrepreneurial orientation, and relatively high socioeconomic status of many Asian Americans. At the time, this was borne out by vote tallies: in the three-way presidential race of 1992, George H.W. Bush received 38% of the national electorate but 55% of the Asian-American vote.

By 2012, however, Mitt Romney drew the support of just 28% of Asian Americans. In every category of age, citizenship, ethnicity, and nativity, Asian Americans (here taken to include people of Pacific Islander ancestry) now report a preference for the Democrats.

The two-decade long collapse in Republican support among Asian-American voters towards the Democrats has been ascribed to multiple causes, including the end of the Cold War, changes in the demographic composition of the Asian-American population, and broader shifts towards the Democratic party in the heavily-Asian West Coast states and Hawaii, where nearly half of Asian Americans reside. But the politics of immigration has also been key. Continue reading “Immigration Reform and the Growing Asian-American Vote” →

The History of Gubernatorial Senate Appointments

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Including yesterday’s appointment of Jeffrey Chiesa, there have been 21 gubernatorial appointments to fill U.S. Senate seats since 1993 — nine resulting from deaths and 12 from resignations. So how does the New Jerseyan fit into the overall pattern?

In 18 of the 20 appointments before Chiesa, the newly named Senators were of the same party as their predecessors. So replacing an archliberal Democrat with a self-described conservative Republican, as is happening in New Jersey, is a real break in usual practice.

However, this is not particularly hard to explain. In only 3 of the 20 cases of vacancies were the Governor and the outgoing Senator of different parties, as with Chris Christie and Frank Lautenberg.

Chiesa fits more comfortably into another emerging pattern: he is a “placeholder” Senator who indicates that he will not run for the seat and who is not really a political figure in his own right. (Although Chiesa was the sitting state Attorney General, New Jersey is one of seven states that fills the AG job by means other than popular election.) Of the 20 other Senators appointed since 1993, seven broadly fit into the placeholder category, with six of these having been appointed just since 2009. Continue reading “The History of Gubernatorial Senate Appointments” →

Lautenberg’s Passing Highlights the Strangeness of Gubernatorial Appointments to the Senate

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The latest vacancy in the U.S. Senate, created by the death of Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey, is a reminder of a rather obscure centennial that took place last week: the enactment of the 17th Amendment on May 31, 1913 and the peculiar practice of a state-level executive appointing a federal legislator.

Until 1913, all U.S. Senators were appointed by state legislatures, which was part of the Founders’ plan for differentiating the House and the Senate. So whenever a vacancy arose in the Senate due to death or resignation, the state legislature would simply fill the position at its next session. Gubernatorial appointments to vacant seats took place from time to time, but were usually short-term affairs that lasted only until action by the state legislature.

Since enactment of the 17th Amendment, gubernatorial appointments can last much longer – in some cases as long as two years. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, thirty-six states allow governors to fill vacancies until the next regular election; most of the other 14 allow governors to make interim appointments until a special election. Continue reading “Lautenberg’s Passing Highlights the Strangeness of Gubernatorial Appointments to the Senate” →

Already, The Most Unproductive Congress Ever

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

At the end of 2012, the 112th Congress went down in history as the most unproductive ever. During 2011-2012, Congress passed a mere 283 laws – fewer than a third of the more than 900 laws passed by the “do-nothing Congress” derided by President Harry S Truman in 1948.

The current Congress, however, is already on track to shatter the dubious record set by its predecessor.

Sixty-six days into the current session (Congress is again in recess this week), Congress has passed a whopping … 10 laws. Count them.

And the most recent of these – Public Law 113-10 – was enacted to address this pressing priority: “To specify the size of the precious-metal blanks that will be used in the production of the National Baseball Hall of Fame commemorative coins.”

Even to catch up to last Congress’s legislative output, Congress would need to pass roughly one bill every other day (and with no more breaks for recess).

Continue reading “Already, The Most Unproductive Congress Ever” →

A Senatorial Centennial: How Congress Was Reshaped 100 Years Ago This Week

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

If you think that dysfunction and elitism in the U.S. Senate are now at an all-time high, then this is a good time to recall that for the first 12 decades of American history, it was often much worse.

It was on May 31, 1913 — exactly one hundred years ago  — that the 17th Amendment was enacted to shift the election of senators from state legislatures to the voters of each state.  This is a largely forgotten episode of American political history, but its effects still resonate down until today.

The original design of Congress only envisioned U.S. Representatives as directly representing the people. Members of the upper house were seen to represent the states and to give them a powerful influence on national domestic politics, and also on the ratification of international treaties.  After the Civil War, Populists began calling for the Senate to be more directly representative of the people.

By the Progressive Era of the early 20th century, other problems had also crept in. State legislatures with chambers under the control of different parties sometimes could not agree on a Senate choice, leaving the seat vacant. These deadlocks were all too often broken through corruption and backroom dealing by party bosses, some of the same concerns that also led progressives to champion the introduction of primary elections.

Continue reading “A Senatorial Centennial: How Congress Was Reshaped 100 Years Ago This Week” →

Mayoral Races of ’70s Offer Similarities, if Little Insight, to the Current Field

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Writing on the New York City mayoral race, New York Times‘ Sam Roberts quotes Fred Siegel on the race’s similarities to the 1970s race:

As it turned out, Mr. Biaggi wound up third in the field of four major candidates. Mr. Beame, then the comptroller, came in first but did not earn enough votes to avoid a runoff against Herman Badillo, a Bronx congressman hoping to become the city’s first mayor of Puerto Rican descent.

But Mr. Badillo’s ill-advised derision of Mr. Beame as “a malicious little man” during a particularly nasty debate helped seal his fate.

Mr. Beame won the runoff, 61 percent to 39 percent, and was easily elected the city’s first Jewish mayor in November, succeeding John V. Lindsay, who had chosen not to run.

“It wasn’t clear who was going to follow him, so you ended up flooding the field,” said Fred Siegel, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute. “No one could stake a strong claim.”

Read the entire article here.