As Rachel Maddow explained so eloquently a while ago—Voodoo Economics such as the Bush tax cuts—never work.

It’s tax season. So in next few days, you'll be hearing a lot of politicians in Washington DC talk about the Buffett Rule, which, if passed, would ensure that millionaires pay at least 30 percent in taxes on their income. The President and his Democratic allies in Congress are rallying around it.

The “Buffett Rule” is important, but it shouldn't be a substitute for rolling back the Bush tax cuts, which along with disastrous wars of choice, are responsible for the last decade's spike in our national debt. In case you missed it, an editorial in today's New York Times made the case clearly (emphasis mine):

The Buffett Rule, which would raise an estimated $50 billion over 10 years, would not make an appreciable dent in the deficit or provide a lot more for essential programs. By comparison, letting the Bush-era tax cuts expire for taxpayers making more than $250,000 a year, as the president has also called for, would raise $800 billion over 10 years.

Mr. Obama must ensure that the Buffett Rule does not become a substitute for ending those tax cuts.

To put all of this in further context, in recent weeks we have been hearing a lot of disconcerting rhetoric coming out of Washington DC about the need to cut our social safety net under the guise of deficit reduction. It’s been disheartening to see Democratic leaders talking up right wing talking points about the need for "shared sacrifice" and a "grand bargain." This is code for raising the retirement age and making brutal cuts to vital programs such as Medicare and Medicaid.

There is no need for our leaders to make concessions like these at the beginning of negotiations. In fact history has shown us that such pre-emptive caving leads to disastrous results. If the Democratic establishment is serious about addressing the national debt and deficit, there is a simple way to do it: Let the Bush tax cuts permanently expire at the end of 2012. Adopting the Buffett Rule alone simply will not cut it.

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Ari Berman penned an incredibly important read in Rolling Stone two months ago on the GOP’s all-out war on voting:

As the nation gears up for the 2012 presidential election, Republican officials have launched an unprecedented, centrally coordinated campaign to suppress the elements of the Democratic vote that elected Barack Obama in 2008. Just as Dixiecrats once used poll taxes and literacy tests to bar black Southerners from voting, a new crop of GOP governors and state legislators has passed a series of seemingly disconnected measures that could prevent millions of students, minorities, immigrants, ex-convicts and the elderly from casting ballots. "What has happened this year is the most significant setback to voting rights in this country in a century," says Judith Browne-Dianis, who monitors barriers to voting as co-director of the Advancement Project, a civil rights organization based in Washington, D.C.

Berman’s piece detailed the efforts of a Republican nationwide campaign, supported by the Koch brothers, which is working to prevent millions of Democrats from voting next year. The story is just now being picked up by traditional media outlets such as the Los Angeles Times, which featured the following telling quote from President Bill Clinton:

"There has never been in my lifetime, since we got rid of the poll tax and the Jim Crow burdens on voting, the determined effort to limit the franchise that we see today," former President Clinton told a group of college students in July.

Thankfully, Obama’s re-election campaign has been putting together a series of responses, fighting these sleazy and frankly anti-democratic GOP tactics, through voter-protection initiatives closely navigating these new election laws. Over in Congress, Representative Keith Ellison has introduced legislation to curb voter suppression. However, those who are interested in pushing back against the GOP’s war on voting, will get a chance to do it the old fashioned way – by VOTING (!) – next Tuesday in Maine.

That’s right, as Berman referenced in his Rolling Stone piece linked above, the GOP-led legislature in Maine passed a bill to end same-day voting registration earlier this year, which has been in effect for almost 40 years. Of course, Maine’s teabagging governor, Paul LePage – who we can call the Scott Walker of New England -- signed the bill. Now the voters in Maine will have a chance to throttle this effort next week through a referendum (which is being called “Question 1”). The polling is close in favor of the good guys (48-44).

Chris Bowers wrote about it on the Big Orange.

However, the campaign in Maine needs everyone’s help. If you want to help out, you can do so by contributing, volunteering and telling your story (if you are from Maine), here. You can also make a contribution to the campaign here as it will need all the help it can get down the stretch as the other side not surprisingly is playing dirty. They are also being bankrolled by secret wingnut donors. So the Mainers are going to need every penny they can get to protect their votes.

This is going to be a huge battle to keep an eye on. If Mainers prevail on Tuesday in protecting their vote, it will give much needed boost to those who are already fighting tooth and nail to beat back GOP’s war on voting.

I wanted to share with you all a video my colleagues from the Senate Democratic war room released four years ago in remembrance of Senator Paul Wellstone, who died nine years ago today:

Thanks to my friend Adam Conner who was kind enough to share that video on his YouTube channel.

Many of us will remember where they were that day in 2002 when we got the news from Minnesota. I found out while I was door-knocking in Maine for Chellie Pingree as she ran against Susan Collins for her Senate seat. Senator Wellstone was a big supporter of the Pingree campaign. Chellie is, of course, now doing great things as the Congresswoman from ME-1.

I can’t believe it has been nine years already. Looking around the political landscape today, I can’t help but imagine how giddy and excited Senator Wellstone would have undoubtedly been in embracing and championing the Occupy movement which has lit up our entire country and spread across the globe.

Do you have any special memories of Senator Wellstone? If so, please share them here in our open thread.

As #OWS turns one month old and continues to spread all over this country and around the globe, just wanted to pass on a quick note about austerity’s crushing effects in Britain. Remember, just couple of months ago London was burning as a result of “toxic mix” of social deprivation, unemployment and austerity.

New economic figures released last week showed David Cameron’s Britain remains “stuck in a vicious cycle of low growth, high unemployment and fiscal austerity”:

New figures released this week reported Britain’s highest jobless numbers in more than 15 years. Independent analysts expect unemployment — now 8.1 percent — to keep rising in the months ahead. The government has kept its promise to slash public-sector jobs — more than 100,000 have been lost in recent months. But its deficit-reduction policies have failed to revive the business confidence that was supposed to spur private-sector hiring.

Drastic public spending cuts were the wrong deficit-reduction strategy for the weakened British economy a year ago. And they are the wrong strategy for the faltering American economy today. Britain’s unhappy experience is further evidence that radical reductions in federal spending will do little but stifle economic recovery.

A few years of robust growth would go far toward making swollen federal deficits more manageable. But slashing government spending in an already stalled economy weakens anemic demand, leading to lost output and lost tax revenues. As revenues fall, deficit reduction requires longer, deeper spending cuts. Cut too far, too fast, and the result is not a balanced budget but a lost decade of no growth. That could now happen in Britain. And if the Republicans have their way, it could also happen here.

Well, it’s not the just the Republicans standing in the way. The question is whether the Democrats will mount a credible counter policy offensive, ripping apart Washington’s bipartisan fetish with austerity,? As the NYT rightly points out, austerity is nothing more than “a political ideology masquerading as an economic policy.”

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Since I last blogged about #OccupyWallStreet, the organic movement has picked up even more momentum. It now appears that New York City’s “established left” is set to join this “mini-movement,” injecting it with more energy and enthusiasm heading into next week. Chris Bowers at DailyKos has a nice run down of how this gathering “has been growing rapidly,” while the Daily Intel quoted a political consultant saying, " it's become too big to ignore."

I think the image that made everyone sit up and take note yesterday afternoon was the following image of hundreds pilots from United airlines showing up at the protest in their uniforms:

That image somewhat shattered the narrative about this protest being some kind of gathering of hippie dippies with nothing better to do. As noted by Digby clearly “something’s happening out there.” The story became even more surreal thanks to a video that appeared to show “images of Wall Streeters drinking champagne from their balconies and kind laughing at these protesters.

So what to make of all this. Matt Stoller spent few days with the protesters last week. He described it as a “church of dissent” at Naked Capitalism. Here are the two grafs that kind of hit me:

What these people are doing is building, for lack of a better word, a church of dissent. It’s not a march, though marches are spinning off of the campground. It’s not even a protest, really. It is a group of people, gathered together, to create a public space seeking meaning in their culture. They are asserting, together, to each other and to themselves, “we matter."

Meaning is a fundamental human need. The act of politicization, of building any movement, is based on individual, and then group self-confidence. As Daniel Ellsberg said, “courage is contagious”. I’m reminded of how Howard Dean campaign worker and current law professor Zephyr Teachout characterized the early antiwar blogosphere and then-radical campaign of Dean, as church-like in their community-building elements. That’s what #OccupyWallStreet reminded me of. Even the general assemblies, where people would speak, and others would respond, had a rhythmic quality to them, similar to churches or synagogues I’ve attended.

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Over at AmericaBlog Matt Browner Hamlin lays out in simple terms why liberals need to join #OcccupyWallStreet. Hamlin specifically zeroes in on a key passage of a must read Glenn Greenwald post pushing back against criticisms coming against these movement from certain mainstream progressive corners:

But for those who believe that protests are only worthwhile if they translate into quantifiable impact: the lack of organizational sophistication or messaging efficacy on the part of the Wall Street protest is a reason to support it and get involved in it, not turn one's nose up at it and join in the media demonization. That's what one actually sympathetic to its messaging (rather than pretending to be in order more effectively to discredit it) would do. Anyone who looks at mostly young citizens marching in the street protesting the corruption of Wall Street and the harm it spawns, and decides that what is warranted is mockery and scorn rather than support, is either not seeing things clearly or is motivated by objectives other than the ones being presented.

Seth D. Michaels from Working America’s “Main Street” blog also made similar arguments yesterday:

What’s important about this protest, to my mind, is not the particular goals, tactics or supporters. While the protest itself has drawn criticism or indifference from many corners, it illuminates two important points. First, the financial sector in this country has been taking up a larger and larger share of the economy as the rest of us have fallen further and further behind. Second, the big banks and investment firms who helped cause the crisis and the recession haven’t been fully reined in or held accountable.

That matters, and people around the country get it. We talk to thousands of Americans in their neighborhoods every week, and they understand the real-life effects of Wall Street’s outsized power: the failure of the economy to create good jobs at good wages, the powerful influence of corporations in our politics, the difficulty of keeping a roof over your family’s head.

If you want to get an understanding of the broad scope of this movement, I would recommend reading up Sarah Jaffe’s piece yesterday describing how these protesters are fighting banksters greed and the surveillance state.

Obviously I don’t expect the wankers in the DC media to get this. They are too busy slobbering all over former Wall Street lobbyist Chris Christie as “the people’s choice,” shamelessly begging him to run for the White House. Those guys are hopeless.

However, I think it is also worth noting that this movement provides a great opportunity for progressive organizations, talkers … well to organize around. The amazing narrative being threaded by these protesters against Wall Street greed and corruption seems to be right in the wheelhouse of traditional progressive groups who have always spoken up against too much money in politics.

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I promise I will not do a lot of “meta” here on C&L, but I couldn’t help myself after I read something this morning. Apparently the Politico’s Ben Smith is experiencing a little bit of “blog neurosis.” He feels confused on how to navigate through his news chores of both blogging and tweeting as he lamented to AdWeek that Twitter is “sort of draining the life from the blog.” His boss Jim VandeHei seems to feel his pain suggesting blogs many not “thrive as robustly as it did four years ago” because of the rise of Twitter.

Well the thoughts from both Smith and VandeHei seem amusing because they give us a peek of the mindsets of traditional media reporters who never fully appreciated the concept of blogging. It is interesting that these reporters are looking at the 2008 election cycle as the time when blogs really came into prominent. This platform actually came into prominence during progressive netroots emergence following the march to Iraq war. I am sure Amato can share his own thoughts on that.

Moreover, reporters like Smith, VandeHei and their colleagues from traditional media outlets in the DC bubble fundamentally misconstrue the purpose of blogging. I have a newsflash for those guys: blogging is not just about breaking news stories with a provocative headline slapped together with a 2-4 paragraph excerpts and 2-3 sentence superficial takes. It is lot more than that. Blogging can have many different purposes including but not limited:

• Aggregating all the news in place to give the readers a sketch of the narrative
• Offering analysis and break-down on micro-angle of a story
• Using it as an organizing platform for community related events
• Using it to lay out a vision/plan – applicable for that community – in the coming months
• Using it as a place to solicit substantive feedback from the community on targeted issues and stories

One can just scroll through years of Crooks and Liars archive to get a sense of the multi-dimensional aspects of blogging which can come in so many different forms, making it a richer place for knowledge (especially when it is run in a smart and strategic way like Amato has done here and also in places like DailyKos, TalkingPointsMemo etc).

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[Graphic via Political Correction]

The Village was rocked this Friday before Labor Day with yet more depressing economic news. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics the U.S. labor market added 0 (that’s right ZERO) jobs in August as the unemployment rate remained saddled at 9.1 percent. As Matt Ygelesias noted right away the strikingly gloomy numbers are “policy results” of conservative economic theories that focuses on “steady cuts to the government sector, offset somewhat by private sector growth.” [See the handy dandy chart above].

It is also a result of the fetish around austerity driven legislative measures that have continued to stagnate our economy. Very interestingly there are couple news items of note today, focusing on other parts of the world with dramatically different economic results stemming from austerity driven measures and from one taking the opposite approach. First, let’s take a look at the part of the world where governments gone on a mad binge of budget cutting measures similar to what we have seen from almost all corners in Washington (except for some resistance in pockets of progressive bubbles). Howard Schneider from the Washington Post reports on how “austerity” may be “killing Europe’s recovery” [emphasis added throughout]:

After more than a year of aggressive budget cutting by European governments, an economic slowdown on the continent is confronting policymakers from Madrid to Frankfurt with an uncomfortable question: Have they been addressing the wrong problem?

The campaign to reduce government deficits has come in response to a European debt crisis that could endanger the global banking system. And the budget cutting has been coupled with a reluctance by the European Central Bank to stimulate economic growth like the Federal Reserve has in the United States; the ECB has instead raised interest rates twice this year to contain inflation.

Those steps have sucked hundreds of billions of dollars out of a European economy that may be edging towards recession.

Such a downturn, by choking off government revenues and increasing the demand for public services, could put struggling countries such as Spain and Italy at risk of missing the very deficit-reduction targets that budget cuts and other austerity measures were meant to achieve.
In the United States, political and economic leaders are facing the similar dilemma of how to rein in the massive federal debt by enacting deep and immediate spending cuts without undermining already anemic economic growth.

Lot of back-peddling going in over in Europe:

The International Monetary Fund, which has generally encouraged “fiscal consolidation” in euro-zone countries, has noted that budget cutting undermines growth and employment. The impact is even more pronounced if many countries are cutting at once and central bank policies are not geared toward growth — just the path Europe is following, according to the IMF.
With the euro-zone economy slowing and governments aggressively cutting, the ECB may need to concede its rate increases and tight money were a mistake, Peter Vanden Houte, an analyst at ING, wrote Wednesday in a research note. “Loose monetary policy seems to be the only medicine left to prevent a painful fall back into recession,” he said.

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So the beltway media has been abuzz this week about Senator Marco Rubio’s increasing national profile. Reporters have been experiencing a case of “starbursts” through their keyboards. They wrote up a slobbering profile of the freshman GOP Senator. Then just days ago Rubio gave a speech at the Ronald Reagan library.

What is happening here is pretty obvious to anyone who wants to cut through the BS. Helpfully Dave Weigel tells us the obvious:

1) Buttered-up profile pieces. Easily done. The Reagan speech got Rubio a McClatchy storyabout how Nancy Reagan personally beckoned him to Simi Valley. "You’ve been identified as someone to watch on the national political scene," she said, giving future Rubio-profile-writers an insta-quote for the beginning of the what-people-are-saying section. From McClatchy, we also learn that John Boehner quoted Rubio, and that this is significant.

2) Scene pieces. See the Frank story for that. Most of the early coverage of Rubio's speech informed us that 1) he gave a speech, 2) the crowd was huge, and 3) he helped up Nancy Reagan when she stumbled.

3) Micro policy news. In the debt speech, Rubio, who had not taken a lead role in the debt limit debate, staked his position: There could be no putting off the "day of reckoning." In Simi Valley, he came out for a gradual Social Security phase-out.

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London has been burning down for last few days. Susie has a great post up connecting the unprecedented social unrest in UK with recent austerity policies deployed by the current administration. I wanted to dig into this a little more yesterday. So I asked couple of friends in England about it. I reached out via Twitter yesterday to couple of good friends in London and asked them if they had any recommendations on good reads that give us a sense of the root cause of London riots.

My friend Alex Smith, who is a former aide to Labour Leader Ed Miliband, and of the leading online opinion leaders in UK’s Labour’s grassroots network, immediately fired off this:

Hard to deduce this could've happened in such extremes w/out years of breakdown in trust due to political, financial, media corruption.

Pointing me to this piece in the Guardian discussing how years of “a 'toxic mix' of poor policing of black and minority ethnic communities and social deprivation” in London may have led to last few days of tragic combustion.

Meanwhile, Weldon Kennedy, a brilliant organizer who has been doing great work as “Director of Human Rights Organizing” at Change.org pointed to couple of additional articles for context. The “big picture” Nina Power provided in the Guardian is sobering (emphasis added):

Since the coalition came to power just over a year ago, the country has seen multiple student protests, occupations of dozens of universities, several strikes, a half-a-million-strong trade union march and now unrest on the streets of the capital (preceded by clashes with Bristol police in Stokes Croft earlier in the year). Each of these events was sparked by a different cause, yet all take place against a backdrop of brutal cuts and enforced austerity measures. The government knows very well that it is taking a gamble, and that its policies run the risk of sparking mass unrest on a scale we haven't seen since the early 1980s. With people taking to the streets of Tottenham, Edmonton, Brixton and elsewhere over the past few nights, we could be about to see the government enter a sustained and serious losing streak. […]

Combine understandable suspicion of and resentment towards the police based on experience and memory with high poverty and large unemployment and the reasons why people are taking to the streets become clear. (Haringey, the borough that includes Tottenham, has the fourth highest level of child poverty in London and an unemployment rate of 8.8%, double the national average, with one vacancy for every 54 seeking work in the borough.)

Those condemning the events of the past couple of nights in north London and elsewhere would do well to take a step back and consider the bigger picture: a country in which the richest 10% are now 100 times better off than the poorest, where consumerism predicated on personal debt has been pushed for years as the solution to a faltering economy, and where, according to the OECD, social mobility is worse than any other developed country.

Hmm, that all sounds pretty familiar to us doesn’t it? Let’s tick of the similarities after the flip.

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