Citizens' Daily Lobby

A recent poll by Democracy Corps, reported at TPM, finds that 55% of likely voters believe that “socialist” describes President Obama as either “well” or “very well.”    Findings like this underscore the effectiveness of the GOP media machine.    Having hugely popular news networks devoted 24/7 to right-wing messaging works.    The answer would likely have been the same if the test word was “communist,” or even “fascist.”  After all, those terms get thrown around almost interchangeably by right-wing talk-show hosts, and “nazi” sometimes gets thrown in for good measure.

It would have been interesting had the pollsters asked for the definition of the word “socialist.”  I’m betting most of that 55% couldn’t accurately define what a socialist is.   If 1/4 of US citizens polled do not know the US fought Great Britain for independence, anything is possible, even likely.

President Obama has reversed his position (or at least what Progressives thought was Candidate Obama’s position) on offshore drilling.  It’s hard to accept that the administration we helped to elect would roll over for the Sarah Palin war cry of “Drill, Baby, drill!”  The truth is, as it has always been, that offshore drilling will not provide enough oil to make us energy independent and it will be years before we see any effects of drilling.

Firedoglake has a petition to the President, asking him to change his course.

Yesterday, to the surprise of many, President Obama announced that the United States will begin drilling for oil in the waters off the Atlantic Coast and the Gulf of Mexico.

Offshore drilling was a contentious campaign issue in 2008, and Obama even criticized his opponents for supporting it because, in his words, “it didn’t do much to reduce energy prices.”

Candidate Obama pledged to maintain the moratorium on offshore drilling to protect our coastlines and acknowledged a “bipartisan consensus” that it was bad policy.  Now he claims offshore drilling is an integral part of reforming the way we consume energy.

If Obama is serious about addressing our environmental and energy concerns, making us even more dependent on fossil fuels while simultaneously destroying our ecosystem is not the way to go about it.

Join us in telling President Obama: offshore drilling isn’t a solution to our energy and environmental problems.

It’s still bad policy.   Haven’t we learned anything from the health care reform battle?  Republicans don’t want to play nicely, even if Democrats make concessions, and this is one concession we don’t need to make.  Sign the petition today.  You may even add a personal note.

I am tired of being the change.  Inertia is on the side of the status quo.    So, unfortunately, are wealth, power, and influence.  And age.    The revolutionaries of the sixties became the reactionaries of the first decade of the twenty-first century.  Where were the rest of us while our parents and grandparents were hijacking our change?  Most were busy squandering our chance, maybe our one chance, to move this country toward the creation of a just society.    Too busy, too jaded, too poor, too comfortable, too spoiled, too anesthetized to speak out, we let our hopes for a better future  be stamped out by the fearful, the selfish, the angry, and the ignorant.

The death of meaningful health care reform is the first sign that the movement for change has stalled.     Too few of us tried to be change for too many.

I started the evening with the intent to post Jane Hamsher’s petition to President Obama, asking him to refuse to sign any health care bill without a strong public option.  Here’s the link. Send him a letter.   Ask him to start being the change.   The rest of us are, as we say here in Arkansas, used up.

Finally, someone is standing up to Fox News.  President Obama will not appear on Fox News for the rest of this year as a protest of the network’s biased coverage.   The White House communications director called the network a “wing of the Republican Party” according to NY Daily News.    Don’t take Obama’s word for it.   Time and again, FOX ‘s obvious bias has been documented.  Most recently, FOX has been overwhelmingly giving time to opponents of health care reform.  A Media Matters study found that opponents of reform outnumbered supporters or those with a neutral opinion 6 to 1 over a 2-day period in August.   Viewers of FOX news are far more likely to be misinformed about health care (Think Progress), and during the Iraq war, they were far more likely to harbor misconceptions about important issues (Misperceptions, the Media, and the Iraq War, WorldPublicOpinion.com.)

MoveOn is circulating a petition urging all Democrats to follow the President’s example and boycott FOX by making no appearances on the network.  It’s not as if participation in network interviews really helps make opposing viewpoints heard.  FOX reporters simply out-shout those with whom they don’t agree, or even shut off their mics.  Sign the petition, and, of course, do yourself a favor:  don’t watch FOX.

President Obama is backing away from a promise he made earlier this year to stick it to off-shore tax evaders.  The President is tabling his plan to recover $210 billion by cracking down on the use of tax havens by corporations in the face of strong pressure from business, according to the Wall Street Journal.    The administration says it remains committed to closing tax loopholes, but we’ll see.    Looks like another point for Corporate America and another loss for Americans.   According to a 2008 Senate report, the US loses over a billion dollars a year in tax revenue due to offshore tax abuses.  Reaganomics tells us that what’s good for the Big Dogs should be good for us little pups as well, but Reaganomics is nothing more than a Republican fairy tale.   (You will note that it was never the downstairs maid that lived “happily ever after.”  That state of being was reserved for the Prince and Princess Charming).   According to a 2008 Senate report, the US loses over a billion dollars a year in tax revenue due to offshore tax abuses.

Huffington Post has the full story.

President Obama hit a nerve yesterday.   The words were hardly past his lips when the predictable pushback from the financial industry began.    Taking a cue from the wildly successful health care fear tactics, the industry is promoting the idea that a Consumer Financial Protection Agency would target everybody from your auto dealer to local mom and pop operations (all 9 of them still standing in the age of Wal-Mart, that is).    They even have a “grassroots” website,   stopthecfpa.com , with a generic old white man (who could be your friendly neighborhood grocer if there were such a thing)  standing guard over his right to issue credit or sell derivatives, or something.    It’s the same old tired argument against increased government oversight of the financial industry with a new focus.

Don’t let them fool you.  This isn’t about Mom or Pop.  This is about big business.  According to 24/7, big banks and securities firms have spent more than $90 million dollars to lobby Congress this year alone, and the US Chamber of Commerce has spent more than $26 million.   You can bet conservative Democrats, who have already shown themselves willing to throw the chance for real, substantial change in this country under the wheels of the corporate bus are special targets for these lobbyists.    Let Blanche Lincoln and Mark Pryor know that Arkansans want to see the financial industry regulated to prevent another greed-induced financial meltdown at the expense of taxpayers.

Progressives must take control of this issue early in the battle for public opinion.  We can’t afford to let Corporate America use fake grassroots front groups to dupe the American people this time.

CREDO reports, and the Wall Street Journal confirms, that the Obama administration has recommended the EPA to reevaluate permits for 79 mountaintop mining permits.  The review will be extensive, according to the EPA.  The coal industry may fight back with a lawsuit, claiming that the EPA has placed a moratorium on new coal mining in several coal states.  Well, it’s about time. Credo sends the following message:

Dear Friend,

Big Coal’s preferred method of destroying the earth, mountaintop removal mining, involves blowing the top off of a mountain, extracting a small bit of dirty coal, and then dumping millions of tons of refuse into nearby streams and rivers, poisoning everything downstream. For the past eight years, Bush’s Environmental Protection Agency rubber stamped this process, leaving landscapes scarred, water contaminated, and communities in ruin.
On Friday, President Obama’s EPA made a big first step towards ending this nightmare. It recommended that all 79 of the pending mountaintop removal mining permits be delayed and subject to further review.
This is a great first step, and the EPA deserves to be lauded for its action. But this is far from the end of the road. The EPA has the ability to reverse Bush-era rules and make this destructive practice illegal.
I just signed a petition to thank EPA Administrator Jackson for delaying the permits, and to ask her to finish the job and end all mountaintop removal mining. I hope you will, too. Please have a look and take action.
http://act.credoaction.com/campaign/coal_mtr_epa/?r_by=5927-2029682-0chAyGx&rc=confemail1

The address to Wall Street given by Pres. Obama today is a breath of fresh air for battle-weary and discouraged Progressives.    The message was terse, but strong, as Mr. Obama chided some Wall Street execs for their quick return to the risky behaviors that brought on the current financial crisis:  Wall Street will be more tightly regulated again.  Finally.

We will not go back to the days of reckless behavior and unchecked excess that was at the heart of this crisis, where too many were motivated only by the appetite for quick kills and bloated bonuses.  Those on Wall Street cannot resume taking risks without regard for consequences, and expect that next time, American taxpayers will be there to break their fall.

Mr. Obama emphasized that the Administration is looking to work with the financial industry to ensure that regulations do not stifle the economy, but he made it perfectly clear that regulation to promote “transparency and accountability”  would come with or without the support of  Wall Street.

And taken together, we’re proposing the most ambitious overhaul of the financial regulatory system since the Great Depression.  But I want to emphasize that these reforms are rooted in a simple principle:  We ought to set clear rules of the road that promote transparency and accountability.  That’s how we’ll make certain that markets foster responsibility, not recklessness.  That’s how we’ll make certain that markets reward those who compete honestly and vigorously within the system, instead of those who are trying to game the system.

What is the plan, specifically?

1) New rules to protect consumers and a new agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Agency to provide oversight.  -There is currently no single agency in our government charged with protecting us from financial fraud, and that needs to change.

2) Closure of the legal loopholes that allowed the financial crisis to occur.   President Obama listed a few examples:

Under existing rules, some companies can actually shop for the regulator of their choice — and others, like hedge funds, can operate outside of the regulatory system altogether.  We’ve seen the development of financial instruments — like derivatives and credit default swaps — without anyone examining the risks, or regulating all of the players.  And we’ve seen lenders profit by providing loans to borrowers who they knew would never repay, because the lender offloaded the loan and the consequences to somebody else.  Those who refused to game the system are at a disadvantage.

…And that’s why we’ll create clear accountability and responsibility for regulating large financial firms that pose a systemic risk.  While holding the Federal Reserve fully accountable for regulation of the largest, most interconnected firms, we’ll create an oversight council to bring together regulators from across markets to share information, to identify gaps in regulation, and to tackle issues that don’t fit neatly into an organizational chart.  We’ll also require these financial firms to meet stronger capital and liquidity requirements and observe greater constraints on their risky behavior.

3) Creation of  “resolution authority” (aka ending the idea that some firms are “too big to fail”).

With so much at stake, we should not be forced to choose between allowing a company to fail into a rapid and chaotic dissolution that threatens the economy and innocent people, or, alternatively, forcing taxpayers to foot the bill.  So our plan would put the cost of a firm’s failures on those who own its stock and loaned it money.  And if taxpayers ever have to step in again to prevent a second Great Depression, the financial industry will have to pay the taxpayer back — every cent.

4)  Work with world leaders to ensure global financial stability.

For this President, and for our country, “normalcy will not lead to complacency.”   Someone must stand between the consumer/taxpayer and those whose only motive is profit.

The house was packed to standing room only tonight at the Democratic headquarters.  Message to the Rabid Right:  Progressives in this state will not give up.

That’s almost all of them, apparently, based on the behavior of party leaders during the President’s address tonight.   First, there was the angry crowd of legislators  waving some sort of document…could it be their “plan”?  Then there was John Boehner mugging for the camera a face ranging from boredom to disgust.  Finally, there was Joe Wilson, R-South Carolina.  Joe Wilson, who called out “you lie” when the President said that illegal immigrants would not be covered under health care reform plans.  He has been called out by members of his own party, including Sen. John McCain, and has apologized.   This type of behavior is inexcusable no matter who is President, and it reveals the deficit of character that is rampant in the GOP today.   DailyKos has a way to fight back against this outlandish and childish behavior:  donate to his challenger  for 2010, Rob Miller ( something my family has already done in the two hour time frame that has elapsed since the speech).  Tonight, the entire GOP, courtesy of Joe Wilson and John Boehner, gets inducted into the Hall of Shame.

Face of the GOP. Photo of CNN broadcast.