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Obama’s End Game: Not With A Bang But a Neoliberal Whimper?

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Well after all the bluster coming from the Democratic camp about President Obama’s “upper hand” leading into the sequester showdown, it turns out he had no game at all.  The result: score another one for the Tea Party who got to take a hatchet to government spending and hold the line on taxes.  As I wrote after the “Fiscal Cliff” showdown:

Grover Norquist is happy.  After the fiscal cliff deal was passed in the House, he pointed out that Obama blinked on his $250,000 line in the sand on taxes and that, by locking in the Bush tax cuts for 98% of Americans, the Democrats’ ability to defend the legacy of the New Deal has been greatly diminished.  He’s right.

And now Grover and company are even happier as the Republicans just said no to more taxes and let the ax fall indiscriminately on government spending.  The “liberal media” may think badly of them and their national approval rating may be in the toilet but they simply don’t give a rat’s ass because they are winning nonetheless.

But fear not progressives, Obama is desperately courting Republicans outside of the party’s leadership in hopes of doing an end run to get to a “grand bargain” that will give us the manna from heaven that is austerity lite.   [Read more…]

Why Can’t Mayor Filner Just Be Nicer? Corporate News as Propaganda, San Diego Style

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As the historic battle between Mayor Filner and San Diego’s big hoteliers over the tourism marketing deal unfolds, it’s clear where the lines are drawn.

On one side, you have a new strong mayor who is committed to ending business as usual in San Diego and on the other, you have folks like Terry Brown, chairman of the San Diego Tourism Marketing Association who, as Matt Potter at The San Diego Reader has pointed out, is a big time Republican funder as are the crew of business lobbyists, real estate developers, and San Diego Taxpayer Association types who have miraculously found they can love a tax after it has transubstantiated into a fee and serves as a giveaway to corporate interests.   [Read more…]

Why Mayor Filner is Right to Stand Up to the Real Bullies

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What Filner is doing here is important and historic: he is standing up to the entitled private interests who have run San Diego for its entire history.

As Doug Porter reported here at the San Diego Free Press last week, Mayor Bob Filner is now engaged in an intense struggle with City Attorney Jan Goldsmith, big hoteliers, and the UT-San Diego because he has refused to sign off on the sweetheart deal negotiated by his predecessor whose legacy is quickly evaporating as you read this.  Specifically, Filner wants legal protections for the city if the dubious deal goes to court, a shorter tourism marketing agreement, a cut of hotel fees for city services, and a living wage for hotel employees.

Other than their questionable notion that the 2% tourist surcharge is not a tax, the real agenda behind the attack on Filner is San Diego’s elites’ desire to maintain their privilege and the advantages that have come to them from decades of shadow government.   [Read more…]

Is Big Oil Too Big to Tax in California?

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Soon our national political discourse will be dominated by the nightmarish sequester debate with the Republicans’ doomsday austerity strategy being countered by the Democrats’ austerity-lite program that draws from the eternal verity of Simpson-Bowles. God help us.

Standing in stark contrast to the reigning austerity-lite crowd inside the Democratic Party is perhaps the brightest progressive hope in the country, Senator Elizabeth Warren. Rather than playing the populist note to bash Republicans and then retreating to safe, chamber of commerce approved positions that put Social Security and Medicare “on the table” like many of her colleagues in the Democratic Party, Warren is consistently taking it to the 1% whenever she can, and she really means it.   [Read more…]

My Bloody Valentine

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It’s the Monday before Valentine’s Day and merchants across America are happily preparing for our annual romance-driven consumer frenzy.  Indeed this schmaltzy commodification of love is worth around $14.7 billion dollars a year with much of it ending in the predictable disappointment that comes when we realize that our frantic, frequently anxious lives just don’t measure up to the prepackaged saccharine dreams we are sold.

Valentine’s Day is the sanctification of an empty, soul-killing romance narrative, a celebration of the notion that the most precious and intangible human emotion can be summoned by the magic of the sexless dollar.  In sum, as currently constituted, Valentine’s Day is where real love goes to die.

The roots of what we think of when we think about buying something to signify love are as American as apple pie, and we might trace the origins of the total commercialization of romance to 1913 when Hallmark began to mass market Valentine’s Day cards as we know them.  This commercial landmark was preceded by the work of Esther Howland who, in 1850, first started to produce and sell Valentines, starting the move away from exchanging personally crafted cards or even poems to trading commodities made by someone else.   [Read more…]

Grading Jerry Brown’s Education Agenda

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It’s the beginning of the new semester at San Diego City College where I work, so I thought this would be a good time to evaluate some of Jerry Brown’s bold moves on the educational front.

In terms of funding, the passage of Proposition 30 has stopped much of the bleeding in schools and colleges across the state, but it still does not do enough to restore all that has been cut in recent years.

Therefore, despite some very good news, challenges remain ahead.

Come inside to see Gov. Brown’s Report Card…   [Read more…]

The Battle for the Soul of the Democratic Party Continues

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In the wake of President Obama’s electoral victory and inauguration much of the political analysis has been about the continued chaos inside the Republican Party. With some establishment conservative figures openly questioning whether it was good for the party to continue to be dominated by the hard right, some in progressive circles have been downright giddy, as they have watched the circular firing squad proceed. While this is surely entertaining sport, the more important battle may be happening inside the Democratic Party.

As Politico recently observed, “almost as soon as the echo of Obama’s inaugural address fades and he instantly becomes a lame duck, Democrats are going to have to face a central and unresolved question about their political identity: Will they become a center-left, DLC-by-a-different-name party or return to a populist, left-leaning approach that mirrors their electoral coalition?”   [Read more…]

Remembering the Real Martin Luther King Jr. Without Apologies

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As we celebrate the rich legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., I am drawn back to my favorite speech of his, “Where Do We Go From Here?”. This was Dr. King’s last address as President of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, given toward to end of his life in 1967. It outlines two core principles of King’s unfulfilled legacy that united the questions of racial injustice with those of economic inequality and rampant militarism. It was a deep, radical interrogation of the underpinnings of American society and it still resonates today.

When dealing with the issue of poverty, King notes that, “We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life’s marketplace. But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.” For Dr. King, this meant looking at the entire society and asking questions about “the economic system [and] the broader distribution of wealth.” It meant thinking about “the restructuring of the whole of American society.”   [Read more…]

What Would We Do Without Wishful Thinking?

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In last week’s column I noted how the tax increases on the 1% included in the “fiscal cliff” deal amounted to little more than the political equivalent of a love tap for the rich because upper income tax rates remain much closer to their historic lows than to their mid-twentieth century highs.  This is disheartening because, as the political narrative shifts toward some form of austerity in the name of deficit reduction, our country’s historically high level of economic inequality remains deeply entrenched and there simply will not be enough revenue to engage in a robust progressive program centered around “nation building at home” as President Obama likes to say.

In sum, the unemployment crisis and other key social and economic needs will take a back seat to deficit reduction and the battles will not be about whether an austerity agenda is the right course for America but rather what form of austerity program we should pursue.  While there is an impressive list of eloquent critics (from Paul Krugman and Robert Reich to Joseph Stiglitz and Bernie Sanders) bemoaning this wrong-headed approach, we seem destined to ignore them and head down a road that spares the comfortable while further burdening the afflicted.   In elite opinion circles, it’s a bipartisan consensus.   Sure the wing nuts on the right are crazy but the even the Democrats are largely wedded to the gospel of Simpson-Bowles.

But isn’t this bitter medicine that will make us all better in the long run?  No, it’s bad policy that amounts to a not too-thinly-veiled class war.    [Read more…]

Obama’s Fiscal Cliff “Victory”: Winning a Battle in the Midst of Losing the War?

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Grover Norquist is happy. After the fiscal cliff deal was passed in the House, he pointed out that Obama blinked on his $250,000 line in the sand on taxes and that, by locking in the Bush tax cuts for 98% of Americans, the Democrats’ ability to defend the legacy of the New Deal has been greatly diminished. He’s right.
  [Read more…]

This Is Where Democracy Goes to Die

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Now that labor has been squashed, the right’s next moves in Michigan includes draconian anti-abortion laws and, sit down for this one, loosening the restriction on concealed weapons in places like churches and schools to please the gun lobby.

While liberals were busy gloating over their electoral victory and crowing about the demise of the right, Grover Norquist, the Koch Brothers, and company were busy going for blood—democracy be damned. Despite getting spanked at nearly every level, the plutocratic wrecking crew kept their eyes on the prize and jammed through a “right to work” law in Michigan, exacting sweet revenge on the Democrats and their labor allies.   [Read more…]

Corporate Censorship in 2012: All the News They Didn’t Deem Fit to Print

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This is not a definition that implies a conspiracy; it is a structural analysis of how our media system works in the real world with all the economic, political, and legal pressures that shape the process of delivering the infotainment we call news.

In last week’s column, I discussed Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman’s propaganda model and noted how it was even more relevant today than it was when they first published Manufacturing Consent in 1988 as the concentration of media ownership they decried in the eighties has only continued to increase dramatically.  I ended that column by referring to Project Censored, an organization that has been monitoring the news media and putting out a list of the top 25 “censored” stories of the year since 1976.   [Read more…]

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