President Bush

Obama’s Extended Federal Family Responds to Sandy

Leo Gerard — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 07:40:15 -0500

In New Jersey, as Barack Obama and Chris Christie met last week to survey the devastation Hurricane Sandy caused, the President placed a reassuring hand on the heartsick governor’s shoulder. Later, the President embraced storm victim Donna Vanzant in Brigantine, N.J., and told her and all East Coast residents that he and the nation “are here for you.”

Here for you means the federal government would muster all its resources to help Americans devastated by a deadly hurricane to restore some sense of normalcy to their upturned lives and to help rebuild their homes and communities.

Americans unfailingly rally to the aid of those in need. A youngster helps grandma across the street. A community builds a wheelchair ramp for an injured veteran. Sometimes, though, the tragedy is too massive for the scale of help that families and neighborhoods can provide. Then Americans turn to the federal government to help them deliver safety and solace. This is among the most profound and basic duties of government. Barack Obama has insisted that it be performed well because he believes government can be – and must be – a force for good.
President Barack Obama greets New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie on arriving in Atlantic City after Hurricane Sandy. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

It’s not a matter of big government or small government. Although, frankly, a government small enough to drown in a bathtub, as Republican lobbyist Grover Norquist seeks, would not be large enough to respond to catastrophes such as Sandy’s destruction across 15 states or to the 750 tornadoes that ripped through the South and Midwest, including Joplin, Mo., in April and May last year. And a federal government that fobbed off responsibility for emergency management to the states or to private enterprise, as Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney said he wanted to do during the GOP primary debates, would not be prepared to respond adequately to American catastrophes.

Romney has walked back those statements now, contending after Sandy hit that he wouldn’t eliminate the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). But the nation has seen what happens when a president is careless about the federal government helping Americans during emergencies. That would be, specifically, former President Bush’s reaction to Hurricane Katrina.

First, Bush chose patronage over qualifications in naming a FEMA director, appointing to the post an Arabian Horse Association functionary who had absolutely no experience or training in emergency management. Then when Katrina hit, the administration virtually ignored it – failing to respond to pleas for help from desperate governors and mayors; failing to cut short vacations, or even meals, to work on hurricane response, failing to provide available federal resources as Americans died in the Superdome.

In stark contrast, Obama demanded credentials when he selected his FEMA director. He went so far as to ignore party affiliation – appointing William Craig Fugate, a Republican. Fugate, who began his career as a firefighter and paramedic, was director of the Florida emergency management agency – a position that exposed him to rigors of responding to disasters, particularly hurricanes.

Even before Sandy struck the East Coast, Obama and Fugate began planning and coordinating a response. Proactively, the President called 20 governors and mayors to offer help and arrange expedited disaster declarations. He called Christie several times during the storm and gave the governor his personal phone number so Christie could reach him directly. He ordered FEMA and other federal officials to respond to calls from political leaders within 15 minutes. Everyone focused on the impending calamity.

Before the hurricane made landfall, FEMA organized search and rescue teams, sent 139 ambulances to New York, and established support centers with supplies like generators and blankets in New Jersey and Massachusetts. By Monday evening, when the storm hit New Jersey with winds of 80 miles an hour, FEMA had already delivered hundreds of thousands of ready-to-eat meals and bottled water for New Jersey residents who might need it. There would be no Superdome fiasco in New Jersey or New York.

By Wednesday, President Obama joined Christie in New Jersey to assess the devastation in person. A clearly exhausted Christie, who had previously been a vocal critic of the President, expressed strong support for Obama’s response to the storm, saying:

“The president has been all over this, and he deserves great credit.”

President Barack Obama embraces Donna Vanzant, owner of a New Jersey marina damaged by Hurricane Sandy. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

When tragedy occurs, we all naturally turn to our families first, brothers and sisters, parents and cousins, aunts and uncles who we know we can depend on, who we know will give us comfort and relief.

Obama sees government as an extended family. He referred to the federal agencies he collected to respond to Hurricane Sandy as a federal family. We all have immediate biological families, but we all also belong to the American family. We share American experiences and values, privileges and responsibilities.

President Obama has said many times that he believes we all are our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers. Here’s what he says in his speeches:

“Yes, our road is longer, but we travel it together. We don’t turn back. We leave no one behind. We pull each other up.”

That is what he sees American family members doing for each other. That is how Americans pull together to help fellow Americans struck by tragedy. And when the tragedy is of gargantuan proportions, Obama believes that to respond effectively, the federal family must be more than competent. It must be good to do good.

In addition to providing the bottled water and rescue teams, the federal family must, just as any good family member would, just as President Obama did in New Jersey, wrap consoling arms around the traumatized.

Romney, Ryan Don’t Get the Average Joe

Leo Gerard — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 09:39:18 -0400

GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney foolishly revived the dust up about his income tax secrecy last week. He claimed he paid at least 13 percent, an assertion easy enough for him to prove by releasing his tax documents.

But he’s refusing to do that. He called the concern about his tax rate “small minded.” Much more important issues overshadow it, he contended.

Maybe so. But the American people, the Average Jane and Joe, do care whether Romney used tricks and loopholes and offshore accounts to manipulate the tax system and pay nothing. And they’re not “small minded,” as Romney accused them of being, for wanting to know.

For them, a quarter billionaire who paid nothing or paid a rate lower than the middle class lacks the principles they like in a president. The vast majority of voters aren’t going to dissect the budget proposed by Romney’s running mate Rep. Paul Ryan, but they will vote based on the values it reveals. Romney’s ability to rattle off technical details won’t decide the election. Morality, or Jane and Joe’s perception that Ryan and Romney’s policies lack it, will.

Other millionaires have led the nation. In fact, the majority of those in the past presidents club were millionaires. But some of the nation’s wealthy presidents had spent time with America’s Average Janes and Joes and understood their dreams and struggles and were sympathetic to them.

Though raised on an estate, Franklin Delano Roosevelt knew suffering firsthand after being cut down by polio as a young man. He spent long periods with working men and women in Southern recuperation centers as he tried in vain to get his legs to work again. Immediately on his election to the presidency, he launched programs to aid the impoverished.

By contrast, Romney and Ryan, both raised in privilege, have demonstrated remarkable insensitivity to everyday Americans.

Romney, scion of a Detroit car company executive, said as GM and Chrysler struggled in the midst of the Great Recession, “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.” He’d have countenanced an uncontrolled bankruptcy for the two corporations, costing tens of thousands of middle-class workers at assembly plants, car dealerships and auto part manufacturers their jobs, their homes and their hopes. He’d have done nothing and let them all suffer. There’s a certain carelessness, a heartlessness to that. Those aren’t values many middle-class workers cherish in a president.

Ryan also grew up without worry about money, in a small town where his family owned a construction business and his father was a lawyer. Because his father died when Ryan was 16, Social Security helped him pay for college. Ryan’s plans, however, imperil Social Security for future generations, for the next decade’s 16 year olds who lose fathers.

Ryan sponsored legislation during the Bush administration to privatize Social Security, allowing the fund to be weakened by the draining of untold billions that would be risked on Wall Street, on the very stock market that crashed during the last year of Bush’s reign, sucking the value out of private pension funds. Many middle-class workers don’t find gambling with their retirement security attractive in a president.

Ryan and Romney are in trouble with America’s Average Janes and Joes over their tax proposals as well. Romney says he wants to cut income taxes by 20 percent for everyone, which he claims he would pay for by ending tax deductions. He has declined to specify which ones, however. Here’s what the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center said about his plan: it would cost the wealthy like Ryan and Romney less and the Average Jane and Joe more.

That’s right. Specifically, the plan would reduce taxes each year for the nation’s wealthiest 5 percent, ranging from a cut of $1,800 for the least rich to nearly $250,000 for the most rich. For the other 95 percent of taxpayers, the nation’s middle class, Romney’s “tax cut” would mean a tax increase averaging $500 per household because, the Tax Policy Center said, tax breaks that the middle class depends on, like the one for mortgages, would disappear. The center said it was a fantasy for Romney to suggest he could fund his plan by eliminating only tax breaks for the rich.

The Average Jane and Joe may not read the entire report. But they do understand this one key fact: The Romney tax plan will cost them more and Romney less. Many will find the injustice of that to be unattractive in a president.

Similarly, Ryan’s budget “Roadmap” would also lower Romney’s tax rate. Ryan would require him to pay less than 1 percent. That’s because the vast majority of Romney's $21 million income in 2010 came from capital gains, interest and dividends, and Ryan would eliminate all taxes on capital gains, interest and dividends.

Most middle-class household income, all of $50,000 a year and declining, comes from wages, not capital gains, interest and dividends. So those families would be paying rates way higher than 1 percent. In fact, the Tax Policy Center determined that Ryan’s budget would raise taxes on the bottom 30 percent of wage earners.

The Average Jane and Joe may not memorize all those facts and figures. But they will recall that Ryan wants quarter billionaires to pay 1 percent and them to pay way more. That’s just galling. Far from what the middle class finds to be a desirable trait in a vice president.

When a reporter asked Romney about his tax rates last week, the Republican candidate had just finished lecturing the ensemble on the intricacies of his Medicare plan using a white board.

What Romney can’t comprehend is that for the middle class, it’s not the numbers.

What the Average Jane and Joe will recall is that Romney and Ryan plan to privatize Medicare, to destroy a beloved program on which the middle class depends. What they’ll know about Romney and Ryan is that their proposed policies show they don’t have a clue what it’s like to struggle. And don’t care. Carelessness is not a quality the middle class finds desirable in the occupants of the Oval Office.

American Workers: The Best Bet

Leo Gerard — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 09:35:05 -0500

Remember the fear in 2008? Think of the collapse of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers. Wall Street melting down. Pension savings disappearing. Housing values plunging and foreclosures skyrocketing. Three million workers losing their jobs.

It had all the makings of another Great Depression. As Barack Obama took office on Jan. 20, 2009, he faced a dilemma. In this crisis he could play it safe and hold steady on his predecessor’s path of pampering the rich and pandering to corporations, pretending that possibly, eventually, some benefit would trickle down to workers. Or President Obama could keep candidate Obama’s promises of change.

He went with change. He focused on workers, believing restoration of the nation’s great middle would drive economic recovery for all. He secured an economic stimulus package and rescued the American auto industry. Both measures worked to halt, and eventually reverse, the previous year’s relentless economic decline. Both, as well as other changes President Obama has proposed, emphasize creating and securing jobs for everyday workers. He wagered on American workers. And it paid off.

As unemployment slowly eases, as the Big Three automakers report huge profits and hire workers, as the stock market slowly climbs and foreclosures slowly drop, Republicans, particularly the GOP presidential candidates, refute it all. They simply deny that the stimulus created the 1.2 to 3.3 million jobs that the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office reports it did. They continue to insist that America should have let Detroit go bankrupt. Instead of betting on American workers, they would double down on Bush’s tax breaks for the rich, subsidies for fabulously profitable corporations and deregulation of Wall Street.

GOP front runner Mitt Romney supported the government bailout for Wall Street but opposed rescuing GM and Chrysler. Like so many Republicans, he’s all for preserving the jobs and institutions and million dollar bonuses for executives. But Republicans offer nothing but cutbacks and pain for workers.

They want to cut back food stamps, raise the retirement age, slash funds for education and Pell Grants for college, slice Medicaid and repeal the health care reform law that will lower the deficit while enabling 32 million uninsured American to get coverage. At the same time, all four GOP presidential contenders would lower or eliminate corporate taxes and further cut levies on the wealthiest so much that their budget plans would increase the national deficit that they’re so keen to criticize.

They’re betting that more tax cuts for the rich will prompt reinvestment and economic resurgence. That’s the gamble former President Bush took when he twice cut taxes on the wealthiest. After seven years, here’s how Bush’s bet on the rich paid off: the economy and jobs were contracting at an alarming rate. Remember the fear in 2008?

Now, three years later, after President Obama placed his faith in workers, the nation’s economic outlook is brighter. As is that of GM and Chrysler.

Both companies suffered managed bankruptcies. Tens of thousands of workers lost jobs. Retirees took health care benefit cuts. Remaining workers accepted pay reductions. Plants and dealerships closed. It was pain all around.

Now, GM is back as the world’s number one automaker, making the highest profits in its history. Chrysler is growing faster than any other American car company. Ford is investing $16 billion in its American operations and plans to bring thousands of jobs back from overseas. Altogether, the industry added 200,000 jobs. In addition, rescuing the industry meant preserving hundreds of thousands of jobs in auto parts factories across America, and all the service jobs they support.

Here’s what President Obama told the 2012 United Auto Workers convention about his wager on them:

“I placed my bet on American workers. And I’d make that same bet again any day of the week. Because three years later, that bet is paying off for America. Three years later, the American auto industry is back.”

In the past few weeks, President Obama has doubled down on his wager on working Americans. He has called for a tax break reversal – ending the deal corporations get for shipping jobs overseas and instead giving it to those who move jobs back on shore. And, just last week, he demanded an end to the $4 billion in subsidies that taxpayers give massively-profitable oil and gas companies, explaining:

“You can either stand up for oil companies, or you can stand up for the American people.”

Republicans immediately attacked the President for the proposal. They criticized him for talking to the auto workers as well. While Republicans regard workers in general as second class citizens, not to be given the deference they reserve for the rich, members of the GOP particularly despise auto workers because they’re members of a labor union. Republican lawmakers hate unions – maybe even more than they loathe President Obama. They can’t tolerate any organization of workers that succeeded in bargaining with fat cat factory owners for weekends off, paid sick days, good pensions and middle class wages, even though the GOP lawmakers themselves benefit from decades of union activism by receiving weekends off, paid sick days, good pensions and very decent wages.

Obama, by contrast, told the auto workers he was honored to be with them, to bet on them:

“It’s unions like yours that fought for jobs and opportunity for generations of American workers. It’s unions like yours that helped build an arsenal of democracy that defeated fascism. It is unions like yours that forged the American middle class – the greatest engine of prosperity the world has ever known.”

It’s a sure bet: Wagering on workers is a winner.