Wisconsin Families Still Leading the Way, One Party Is Helping

Dedicated people in the Democratic Party are listening. The Wisconsin Democratic Party is listening.

Robert Kuttner has a typically insightful piece, A More Perfect Union in The American Prospect, noted this morning in the Democratic Strategist.

The Strategist concludes:

Kuttner's piece clarifies, without saying it, why the public workers of Wisconsin and Ohio have fought so hard to protect their collective bargaining rights. As Kuttner explains, 'In the end, this story is all about power, and power used responsibly.'"

Observers like the Strategist are calling Obama's speech a "Game-Changer," in the political power games in America, akin to something between ratification and democratic elections.

Power, the capacity to determine social arrangement and how decision making in our society is accomplished, is Democracy—why the Occupy and the 99 Percent movements have been being abused in the streets of the United States to deafening silence of politicians of every stripe.

Yesterday, echoing these citizens movements, President Obama [not soon enough for many] delivered this message in Osawatomie, Kansas:

In the last few decades, the average income of the top 1 percent has gone up by more than 250 percent to $1.2 million per year. I’m not talking about millionaires, people who have a million dollars. I’m saying people who make a million dollars every single year. For the top one hundredth of 1 percent, the average income is now $27 million per year. The typical CEO who used to earn about 30 times more than his or her worker now earns 110 times more. And yet, over the last decade the incomes of most Americans have actually fallen by about 6 percent.

Dedicated people in the Democratic Party are listening. The Wisconsin Democratic Party is listening.

The instant they stop listening, the instant the Party becomes a collection of bureaucrats and group-think, robotic careerists sucking up money; in a manner of speaking: The time then will come for blowing down that Democratic Party house and then re-building.

For now, the Democratic Party is our best ally against the likes of Paul Ryan, Scott Walker, Reince Priebus and the bunch of flaky, Ayn Rand-worshipping colleagues feasting their eyes on our Social Security, Medicare and veterans benefits.

Obama Critics to Appear at Joint Economic Committee

Update: See Too Much To Handle? Why I expect Obama's poll numbers to plummet soon at TNR by John Judis.

Via Robert Kuttner:

'Part of the Way with LBJ'
- Students for a Democratic Society button, circa 1964

The Joint Economic Committee (JEC) hearing next Tuesday (May 19) will feature testimony from leading critics that one hopes will highlight the 'absurdity of the Summers/Geithner approach (to the financial crisis) and help animate skepticism in the media, the public, and eventually the President.'

Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz; former IMF chief economist Simon Johnson, whose recent piece in the Atlantic Monthly compared the US to third-world kleptocracies, and Thomas Hoenig, the most outspokenly critical of the regional Federal Reserve Bank presidents (are scheduled to appear before the committee).

The JEC is a "bicameral Congressional Committee composed of ten members from ... the Senate and the House of Representatives. ... Its main purpose is to make a continuing study of matters relating to the US economy."

Suffice it to say that Obama does not deserve and has not earned the benefit of the doubt on foreign policy, the financial crisis, civil rights for gays, transparency, well anything.

It's D-Day, Shiller, Roubini, Stiglitz, Kuttner and Krugman Sound Alarm

Just saying.

- Roubini's Pissed-Off and Stiglitz Goes Ballistic

- Robert Shiller: Depression Lurks Unless There’s More Stimulus

- Krugman: Green Shoots and Glimmers

- Kuttner: Will Obama's Economic Team Lead Him Off a Cliff?

Politically, it's time for a for-us or against-us ultimatum to the GOP while people still recognize that Bush and his GOP brought us to this mess. The TEA Party was a joke, for now.

But the idea that we have to try the recovery program now and then try something else, more comprehensive, in the Fall ain't going to work while the economy continues its slide and the GOP continues trring to appropriate unfocused frustration and aggression.

Be bold and great forces of the American people will come to your aid. "Choo-choos," as some the Tea Set derogated the labor-intensive high-speed rail project should be just the beginning of a massive public works program. [I know we have some begun now.]

And everyone knows that the fare of Robert Gibbs' “you will see in a systematic and coordinated way the transparency of determining and showing to all involved some of the results of these stress tests” didn't play and appears emblematic of opacity.

This recovery needs to be framed as Obama against Newt, Rush, Sarah Palin and the GOP.

Spook them [the GOP] , scare them [the public], shake the markets.

I know this more confrontational political strategy is being considered; well now it's D-Day, and Gen. Patton-Obama ought to lead the landing this time and all operations thereafter.

A Vision for High Speed Rail

Seven Sins of Deregulation

See the Seven Deadly Sins of Deregulation -- and Three Necessary Reforms by Robert Kuttner for a run-down on the melt-down.