Sorry State

Updated on Dec. 24 in second paragraph with layoff statistics

My mother put food on the table through her metermaid job despite enduring regular harassment from the public so I have a soft spot in my heart for government workers. But regardless of my family history, the scapegoating of local and state workers for our nation's debt and deficit is disgraceful and the upcoming givebacks and layoffs involving them will be disastrous for us all.

As I made a white knuckle, teeth-gritting, 425-mile journey through an Ohio snowstorm to a job interview in Pennsylvania last week - having covered a lot of road carnage as a reporter I'm extra paranoid when driving - I was grateful for the state employees manning the plows and wondered if I would've made it safely without them. Some 300,000 local, state and federal workers have been laid off since January of 2008 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/24/opinion/24krugman.html?src=ISMR_AP_LO_MST_FB

And then on Sunday I was treated to a smear job on local and state workers masquerading as journalism on the once great 60 Minutes http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7166293n To watch the segment - I confess to screaming profanities at the television screen as I worked out at a gym - you would've thought that the massive budget shortfalls of our states http://www.epi.org/economic_snapshots/entry/snapshot_20091118/ were due to government overspending and greedy public sector unions like the Amercian Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the union my mother was a member of.  The reality is the shortfalls are due to the housing bubble bursting as economist Dean Baker of The Center for Economic Policy and Research notes http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/cbs-news-joins-the-attack-on-public-employees.

Baker also points out that the 60 Minutes piece is not only misleading but inaaccurate. Local and state governments spent $45 billion more than they took in, not the half a trillion figure cited by 60 Minutes reporter Steve Kroft without attribution. Baker goes on to note that "if revenue had increased in step with normal growth (2.4 percent real growth, plus inflation), state and local governments would have had an additional $290 billion since the start of the downturn."

The most infuriating part of the segment on arguably the nation's most respected and influential TV newsmagazine is how Kroft gave Christie a free pass. Christie insisted he cancelled a rail tunnel project that would've created 6,000 construction jobs and eased congestion in New Jersey and New York because the state can't afford it.

"Where am I getting the money? I don't have it. I literally don't have it," Christie said. And sadly because Kroft didn't challenge him and the average viewer doesn't have all the facts, Christie sounded very reasonable and came off as a governor who inherited a mess he didn't create and is now forced to make tough choices.

In fairness, the project could cost some $11 billion, about $2.5 billion more than projected but federal taxpayers were covering at least $3 billion and Christie had options. He could have bonded the project or raised taxes  to help pay for it, options that Kroft never asked him about.

Nor did Kroft ask how a Republican whose party is largely responsible for the massive tax cuts for the rich over the last 30 years that have shrunk local and state revenue and for the lack of financial policing that allowed the housing crash to occur, can blame the red ink on overspending and greedy union workers. How the guy whose party says liberal policies are responsible for the nation's nearly 10 percent unemployment rate can put thousands of teachers and other state workers on the unemployment line. How that's good for taxpayers who will have to cover the costs of their unemployment benefits and other social costs when the jobless have their homes foreclosed on and end up out on the street.

No, according to Kroft, Christie is the "canary in the coal mine" sounding the alarm about overspending and overly generous pensions. Never mind that the average yearly AFSCME pension is $19,000 and 80 percent is paid for by employees and investment returns http://www.afscme.org/press/33924.cfm Or that pension values nosedived due to risky financial bundling of them with junk bonds in "collateralized debt obligations" applauded by Republicans as an example of free market innovation by Wall Street which can police it self and doesn't need government regulation. Self-policing that is about as effective as voluntary speed limits.

Christie, a self-serving, grandstanding bully even resorted to the classic race to the bottom mentality in arguing for slashing benefits and pensions. "The general public thinks, 'I can't believe anybody gets a pension anymore. I've got a 401(k). It got killed in the stock market. I don't know what I'm gonna do for my retirement. I can't believe people get a pension anymore."

That's right governor. If I don't have heat or indoor plumbing in my home, why should my neighbor? Instead of fighting for decent benefits and pensions for all Americans, lets take them away from the few middle-class people who do have them. Why should someone else get to retire if I have to work until I drop?

As a reporter, I've seen my share of government incompetence and yes there are always a few lazy workers who get protected by a union just as there are a few lazy workers in union less jobs. But when we adapt the mentality of leaders like Christie, we pit neighbor against neighbor.

Who are these supposedly greedy and overpaid union workers? They're firefighters, police officers, postal workers, soldiers and teachers. They're the people who educate our children, clear our roads and keep us safe. They're our family and friends like the young woman I know who goes to work every night in an understaffed Ohio veterans home while juggling a full course of college classes to better herself.

When we sacrifice them for the sins of others it is a classic case of split and divide and blaming the victim. We punish them at our own peril because we are ultimately punishing ourselves.

The Great Capitulator

(Updated on Wednesday in third, fourth and final paragraph)


Maybe it's because he's been so successful at being The Unthreatening Black Man to white people for his whole life, but it doesn't really matter why. Monday's sellout on tax cuts for the rich defintively proves Barack Obama will not fight for working people and we shouldn't fight for The Great Capitultor in 2012.

My only encounter with Obama was in 2008. He was a presidential candidate who ducked my questions about donations to him from Big Oil executives http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=e01 as I shouted to him while he walked by me during a rally I was covering while a reporter for the News-Sentinel in Fort Wayne, Ind . I wasn't surprised. Politicians ducking tough questions from reporters is unfortunately the status quo, but successful presidents cannot always duck a fight.

Barack Obama isn't one of them. He's proven as effective at fighting for the American people as a one-legged man at an ass-kicking contest.

Forget all the tough talk at his self-serving talk at his Tuesday press conference in which he denounced liberals like me for being "purists" because we and the majority of Americans don't believe people earning $250,000 or more per year deserve a tax cut with nearly double digit unemployment, some 40 million people living below the poverty line and the nation on the brink of another Great Depression.

Obama portrayed himself as the defending the middle class who would've seen their taxes rise slightly if a deal wasn't cut and the unemployed whose benefits the Republicans were refusing to extend. But the truth is Obama didn't want to have to defend being labeled by his opponents as the guy who raised everybodies taxes when he runs for re-election.

Obama's latest cave in which he allowed Republicans, who are the minority in the House of Representatives and Senate, to roll him by continuing tax cuts for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans, should be the final straw for anyone considering supporting Obama in 2012. Defenders of Obama have taken on the tone of a domestic violence victim. He hurts me but he doesn't really mean to and I change him.

Sure, I'll hold my nose and vote for Obama as the lesser evil to a Republican alternative, if I have no choice. So will most flaming liberals like me. But I'm willing to spend money and time on a Democratic or third party alternative candidate and so should you.

Maybe it's outgoing Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold or Sherrod Brown, one of my senators here in Ohio where I moved to on Dec. 2. Or ousted Florida Rep. Alan Grayson, a fighter with deep pockets. Anybody who understands that you don't make friends with bullies, you fight them or you get beaten unmercifully, something that will probably happen to Obama if he runs in 2012, given the economy's freefall.

There are some things a president has to be willing to draw a line in the sand on and another giveaway to the superrich is one of them. The tax rate for the richest Americans was about 90 percent in 1933 and about 70 percent when in 1981 when Ronald Reagan AKA St. Reagan, took office in 1981. Tax revenue helped build a middle-class and an infrastructure that were the envies of the world. And now both are crumbling and America is beginning to resemble a Third World nation with Obama's sellout the latest example of America's bananna republic politics.

Unlike many liberals, I had few illusions about Obama. A tipoff was his 2004 speech at the Democratic Convention in which he first made his mark on the national stage. His allusions to the Vietnam War and the battle of Fallujah in Iraq smacked of the kind of cheerleading for American militarism and war crimes which have caused millions of deaths and financially and morally bankrupted this country.

Candiate Obama criticized the Iraq War as a "strategic blunder" but never said it was illegal and immoral and as a senator voted to continue funding it. Candiate Obama criticized the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping, but voted to renew the Patriot Act further depriving Americans' already deeply eroded civil rights.

Candidate Obama worried that single-payer healthcare - Medicare for all which would end this nation amoral for-profit medical care system and save $350 billion annually http://www.pnhp.org/facts/single-payer-resources - would lead to job losses in the healthcare industry. It would: the people denying healthcare to the needy because of "pre-existing conditions" and looking for loopholes to avoid payments for care.

Obama likes to brag about Obamacare being historic, but this "reform" resulted in windfall profits for the insurance industry by ensuring guaranteed customers, the healthiest of whom will be cherry-picked by companies with the sick being "lemon-dropped." The healthcare law doesn''t include universal coverage, a public option and Obama took single-payer off the table before negotiations even started.

Obama's other signature "reform" was financial regulation which is completely toothless and allows for the same kind of Wall Street betting with other people's money that caused  the economic meltdown. This was partially due backroom dealings by some of the Bill Clinton cronies Obama got appointed who also advised him to seek a far too small $800 billion stimulus that didn't reduce unemployment significantly and led to the Republican midterm landslide.

After collecting an embarassingly undeserved Nobel Peace Prize and shamefully invoking the name of Martin Luther King while defending the right of America to continue to act as the world's rogue cop, http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2009/12/barack-obama-nobel-peace-prize-speech-text.html Obama escalated the Afghanistan War which anybody with a remote commonsense or a sense of history can see is a fool's errand.

Obama escalated the secret and notoriously inaccurate drone strikes in Pakistan which have created far more enemies than those killed and made Americans more vulnerable to homegrown terrorists like failed Times Square bomber Faisal Shazad who was radicalized by the drone strikes http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/2970442/faisal_shahzad_states_nyc_car_bomb.html

Obama called for more offshore oil drilling before the devastating oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico by BP, which contributed more to him than any other politician in 2008. The kind of contribution he didn't want to talk to me about as a candidate. Obama cut backroom deals at the Copenhagen climate conference that will hasten rather than prevent an environmental catastrophe and somehow maintained a straight face while invoking "clean coal" as a way to reduce carbon emissions which are killing the planet http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/02/obama-defends-clean-coal.php

Sure, Obama was handed a financial mess by President George W. Bush, but he has adopted the same rhetoric as the hypocritical  Republican and Blue Dog Democrats deficit hawks who have no problem adding to $700 trillion to the deficit for tax cuts for the superrich, but balk at extending benefits to unemployed people like me. And the Deficit Commission Obama established is a strawman to give him cover to cut Social Security.

Obama is articulate and intelligent and basically came from nothing to be elected president. Much of it was due to hard work, unlike Bush, an arrogant child of privilege who basically had everything handed to him. But for all his failings, Bush was at least able to articulate and fight for what he believed in no matter how reprehensible and damaging it was to this nation.

Obama is a centrist appeaser and those in the middle of road get crushed. If your goal is only to get half a loaf you'll always end up with crumbs. Americans deserve a fighter who understands that if you go down, you at least go down fighting, something Obama doesn't understand. If he won't fight for us, why should we fight for him?

Nearly a Decade of Delusion

Just over a year ago as he contemplated whether or not to escalate the Afghanistan War, I wrote President Obama a letter asking him to de-escalate which he chose not to do. On Friday, Obama made a surprise visit to Afghanistan where he told soldiers they were making "important progress." http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/04/us/politics/04prexy.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=a24

I'm reminded of Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg's excellent autobiography http://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Memoir-Vietnam-Pentagon-Papers/dp/0670030309 in which he recounts flying back from Vietnam with Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in the early years of the Vietnam War. Ellsberg tells McNamara that no progess has been made in the last year and McNamara agrees, but when McNamara gets off the plane, he tells reporters the war is going well.

Obama is too smart to be delusional enough to believe progress has been made. His comments are spin because like so many presidents before him, he is too weak to resist the powerful forces that profit off of our nation being at war.

As this week's Wiki Leaks documents on the Afghanistan War show, nearly everyone involved concedes it's a diaster. Nine years after the invasion which was designed to capture Osama Bin Laden and eliminate the al-Qaeda fighters responsible for 9/11, the US admits that there are few al-Qaeda members in Afghanistan - they're in our ally Pakistan's territory and Bin Laden probably is too if he's alive.

Meanwhile nearly 1,400 American soliders have been killed http://siadapp.dmdc.osd.mil/personnel/CASUALTY/state_oef_oif.pdf and thousands of Afghanis, many of them unarmed civilians accidentally, or in some cases intentionally, have been been killed by Americans. This makes them despise us and creates more enemies for every Afghan, innocent or not, killed. And the cost of the war is some $74.3 billion and counting at a time of record deficits and debt in this country, skyhigh unemployment and a crumbling instrastructure desperately in need of dollars.

I could go on, but everything in my letter to Obama still applies a year later, so I'm reprinting it.

10-30-09

Evan Goodenow

333 W. Suttenfield St.

Apt. 1

Fort Wayne, IN. 46807

President Barack H. Obama

The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW

Washington D.C. 20500

Dear Mr. President,

Doing the right thing is rarely easy or politically expedient. Whatever decision you make in Afghanistan, some will hate you for it, but we will withdraw from Afghanistan. The question is only when and how much blood and treasure it will cost us.

This letter is not meant as a lecture. It is simply one American trying to convince the president I voted for not to make a tragic mistake.

The majority of Afghanis don’t want us there any more than we would want a foreign army occupying our nation. Counterinsurgency is just a kinder, gentler occupation, but an occupation nonetheless. Once we had a revolution to throw out an occupying army and to the Afghanis, we are the Redcoats.

You have said you would not hesitate to use force to protect Americans or American interests, but force is often not in our interests and makes us less safe. The more we kill, the more enemies we create. I am not a pacifist – a president should not rule out force as a last option – but I am a realist.

I’m also realistic enough to know that another 9/11 attack is inevitable and if you were to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan before an attack occurred, the Right would use it to make you appear weak. However, we both know the argument that we must stay in Afghanistan to prevent al-Qaeda from returning and using it as a safe haven to launch attacks against the U.S. and our allies is bogus.

Most of the planning and training for 9/11 was done in Hamburg, Germany and in the U.S. One of the 19 hijackers had his name listed in the San Diego phone book. With our lax gun laws, terrorists could easily obtain semiautomatic rifles in the U.S. and train in the woods before launching an attack. They don’t need to use Afghanistan.

Al-Qaeda is more of an ideology now than an actual organization. By conducting a war against them instead of treating them like the criminals they are, we have elevated their status in the Muslim world. And if the safe haven argument were valid, it would mean occupying a dozen other Muslim countries including nuclear-armed Pakistan.

Besides the lives saved by a withdrawal, some of the money saved could be used to secure our nation. About 95 percent of the cargo shipped into the U.S. is never inspected and the budget to prevent nuclear proliferation – and prevent terrorists from getting their hands on missing plutonium and detonating a nuclear bomb in the U.S. – is woefully inadequate. The turf battles and lack of coordination between the CIA, FBI and NSA that allowed the 9/11 attacks to occur continue.

Those problems cannot be solved with 68,000 U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. Or by adding more.

It must be excruciatingly painful for you to speak with families of soldiers killed in Afghanistan. And I realize that most of their families will never accept that their sons’ and daughters’ lives were wasted. But the argument that we cannot withdraw because it would dishonor the dead is the same as saying many more must die because some have died.

You’re a lot smarter and more articulate than me and can convince most Americans the war in Afghanistan isn’t worth winning even if it was winnable. But if a withdrawal prevents you from getting re-elected, that’s a price worth paying to be on the right side of history. Peace also takes courage.

Sincerely,

Evan Goodenow