Each morning, Bill Scher and Terrance Heath serve up what progressives need to effect change on the kitchen-table issues families face: jobs, health care, green energy, financial reform, affordable education and retirement security.
MORNING MESSAGE: America's Affluent and the New Bunker Down
OurFuture.org's Sam Pizzigati: "Just 40 years ago, most Americans rubbed elbows with neighbors from a fairly wide cross-section of income levels. But today's rich, Census data show, are keeping everyone else at arm's length — and more. Back in 1970, the vast majority of Americans lived in neighborhoods that did mix people of substantial and modest means. No more. In fact, says a new study just released by the Russell Sage Foundation and Brown University, the share of Americans living amid intense income segregation has more than doubled. America's rich haven't just become richer, show the study data from Stanford University sociologists Sean Reardon and Kendra Bischoff. They've become far more likely to live among their own kind. The same for the poor."
Supercommittee Fail
Debt committee: On the verge of failure [CNN]: "A weekend of talks among members of the congressional committee charged with coming up with $1.2 trillion in budget cuts appeared to produce no last-minute compromise ahead of Monday's practical deadline. Democratic and Republican aides told CNN on Sunday that discussions had turned to how to announce the failure to reach a deal. A senior Democratic aide said talks are focused on a Monday announcement."
Sen. Patty Murray says the Bush tax cuts are the supercommittee's sticking point Politico: "Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) was not optimistic Sunday, saying the Bush tax cuts remained the "sticking divide" preventing the supercommittee from reaching a deal to reduce the federal deficit by at least $1.2 trillion over the next 10 years. 'There is one sticking divide, and that is the issue of what I call shared sacrifice. Where everybody contributes at a very challenging time for our country,' she said on CNN's 'State of the Union,' referring to the Bush tax cuts. 'The wealthiest of Americans, those who earn over $1 million a year, have to share too. There's that line in the sand, and there aren't any Republicans willing to cross it.'"
Marshall Auerback writes that the failure of the supercommittee might be America's best hope for recovery: "If the super committee fails to come up with an alternative plan by Thanksgiving, the cuts will hit defense and domestic programs equally. But those cuts won’t begin to go into effect until January 2013, two months after next fall’s election, which also means that the programmed fiscal restriction planned for next year won't come into effect. The likelihood of failure is provoking a negative reaction in both the markets and the mainstream press. But in spite of that, failure might be the difference between sluggish, moderate growth in the U.S. and double dip recession... But not if the super committee goes big and enacts huge budget cuts. In that kind of scenario, economic growth in the U.S. next year will be held back (or worse) by programmed fiscal restriction as even greater amounts of income are withdrawn from the economy, especially if cuts are implemented in programs such as Social Security."
Jeffrey Sach's spills the beans on the supercommittee's big lie: "The big political lie of the Super Committee is that the deficit must be closed mainly by cutting government spending rather than by raising taxes on corporations and the super-rich. Both parties are complicit. The Republicans want to close the deficit entirely by cutting spending; Obama has brandished the formula of $3 of cuts for every $1 of tax revenues. On either approach, the poor and middle class would suffer grievously while the rich and powerful would win yet again (at least until the social pressures boil over)."
Made In China
Obama asserts growing US stake in Asia [AP]: "President Barack Obama's close attention to the Asia-Pacific region signaled both a turn toward a part of the world experiencing solid growth and one away from Europe's dark economic woes, at least temporarily. The president's nine-day trip to Hawaii, Australia and Indonesia was marked by back-to-back summits and high-profile pronouncements, including decisions to station U.S. Marines in northern Australia, advocate a new free-trade area that leaves China out and call on Beijing not to buck the current world order."
Robert Kuttner reports that American policy — not just American goods — are made in China: "China is a mercantilist and authoritarian state that is determined to appropriate not only U.S. jobs but also U.S. advanced technology through illegal subsidies, suppression of worker rights, and deals with U.S. industry that are one part lucrative carrot ...and one part illegal stick ... Even then, you must produce mainly for export back to the U.S., not for sale in China. Worse still, U.S. industry has been happy to take these deals, which makes them a domestic ally of the China lobby. While our government periodically makes half-hearted complaints that the Chinese currency, the Renminbi, is seriously undervalued, American corporations like that just fine -- because it makes their exports to the U.S. from Chinese factories even cheaper. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which fights industrial policy at home, lobbies fiercely against any pressure from Washington against Beijing's mercantilism."
Occupy Everywhere
Laurence Lewis at DKos, writes that the OWS movement isn't going anywhere: "The Occupy movement is entering a new phase, but it is not going away. When the powers that be come to terms with that reality, their responses will degenerate even further, and it remains incumbent upon all who want the Occupy movement to succeed that the movement itself remain non-violent, and that one of its prime goals be to attract and inspire ever greater numbers of supporters. The polls continue to show strong support for the economic goals of the Occupy movement, even as the politicians continue to wage their Shock Doctrine class warfare, and the movement must consider whether each planned action will inspire or alienate potential allies in the wider public. This is a time for determination, for principle and for clarity. The truth and the facts remain on the side of the Occupy movement, and supporters of the movement must ensure that they remain so."
WaPo's E.J. Dionne writes that the occupation doesn't really have to end: "The breakup of some of Occupy's encampments signals a new phase for the movement. This does not have to mean its end. On the contrary, it is an opportunity... More important, the movement should remind itself of its greatest innovation, its slogan: 'We are the 99 percent.' This is an affirmation that it is trying to speak for nearly everybody. Its tactics should live up to this aspiration by building support among the vast number of Americans who will never show up at the encampments. It should also want to help political figures such as Warren, who understood far earlier than most the costs of inequality and of the abuses of financial power. The last thing this movement should want to do is create fodder for the ads and e-mails propagated by Warren's foes. The occupations have done their work. Now it's time to occupy the majority."
Greg Sargent lets us in on how Wall Street views the protesters: "MSNBC’s Chris Hayes just aired an exclusive that provides an interesting look at how some of those being targeted by Occupy Wall Street may really view the protests. He reported that a memo from a prominent corporate lobbying firm to the American Bankers Association proposed an extensive public relations campaign — including opposition research into key movement figures and an elaborate media strategy — designed to discredit the movement, and Dems who embrace it. The memo was authored by lobbyists at the firm Clark Lytle Geduldig Cranford — and there are two key takeaways. The first is that some allies of Wall Street firms see Occupy Wall Street as a potential long term political threat. The second is that they see the Democratic strategy of embracing the populist message of the protests as something that could work, rather than something that is an automatic negative for Dems, as conservatives keep proclaiming is the case."
Andy Kroll declares victory for the OWS movement in Ohio: "No headlines announced it. No TV pundits called it. But on the evening of November 8th, Occupy Wall Street, the populist uprising built on economic justice and corruption-free politics that’s spread like a lit match hitting a trail of gasoline, notched its first major political victory, and in the unlikeliest of places: Ohio... Occupy Wall Street has already won its first victory its own way -- in Ohio, when voters repealed Republican governor John Kasich's law to slash bargaining rights for 350,000 public workers and gut what remained of organized labor's political power."
Breakfast Sides
Paul Krugman explains the difference between technocrats and romantics: "I know from technocrats; sometimes I even play one myself. And these people — the people who bullied Europe into adopting a common currency, the people who are bullying both Europe and the United States into austerity — aren’t technocrats. They are, instead, deeply impractical romantics. They are, to be sure, a peculiarly boring breed of romantic, speaking in turgid prose rather than poetry. And the things they demand on behalf of their romantic visions are often cruel, involving huge sacrifices from ordinary workers and families. But the fact remains that those visions are driven by dreams about the way things should be rather than by a cool assessment of the way things really are. And to save the world economy we must topple these dangerous romantics from their pedestals."
At DKos, Georgia Logothetis cites the statistic that half the members of Congress are millionaires as the reason for the empathy deficit in Washington: "Can wealthy politicians empathize with the plight of the American working class? Of course they can. Not all politicians grew up in privilege. Vice President Joe Biden is a classic example of an elected official whose working class roots guide him today. And even among those who were lucky enough to be born into the 1%, wealth and a just heart are not mutually exclusive by any measure. But there is no escaping the fact that far too often, our millionaire representatives preach sympathy on the campaign trail and commit legislative sins against the working class once elected... And that's why Occupy Wall Street is so important... Because while it's easy to shake the hand of a supporter at a county fair and move on, it's not easy to shake off the narrative-changing protests that are still taking place across the country. Whatever the end result of the protests, they can and have caused members of Congress to perk up their ears and, at the very least, listen."
