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Americans need to face a hard fact: we almost certainly dodged another Great Depression by a hair’s breadth thanks to the combined efforts of Bush Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, the Obama administration and the much maligned Democratically-controlled Congress. But the fallout from the near economic collapse and financial meltdown is likely to endure for years and not months. The problems are deep and widespread, global and not merely national in scope

Whilst our government is not entirely helpless in the face of this recession, neither does it have in its bag of tricks a silver bullet or a magic wand to make it disappear. Unaccustomed as they are to an unemployment rate near 10%, Americans are unlikely to see a dramatic improvement any time soon no matter which party rules in the White House or congress.

In Europe, the harsh consequences of recession-induced joblessness is ameliorated significantly by a substantial social safety net that provides a livable income, retraining opportunities and housing assistance.  America’s Swiss-cheese version offers few such protections. The fact is Americans are just a pink-slip away from personal catastrophe, where a job lost can mean no health insurance (although thanks to Democrats that will change by 2014) and perhaps homelessness for themselves and even their children.

On NPR recently I listened to some bright spark from one of the right-wing think tanks explain why extending unemployment benefits is a disincentive to those who have been unemployed longer than a few months to search vigorously for a job – this despite credible estimates that there are five job seekers to every available job in the market. Is $300 a week a fortune to people who were earning $50K just year ago? Not on the planet most of us live on, that’s for sure. He went on to suggest more of the unemployed should be willing to uproot their families and move; or be prepared to take a job at McDonald’s at minimum wage, as though you can support a family that way.

Appalling, outrageous and shameful though it may be, this is the prevailing view on the right and among congressional Republicans. It highlights the extent to which most Republicans are completely out of touch with the way most Americans live, and lack any ability to empathize with those in distress.

So it does matter which party steers us through the hard times and best prepares the country to take advantage of the global recovery when it does come. And that, ladies and gentlemen, would be the Democrats.

American families that are hurting need help not platitudes. Yes, they need jobs. But these do not grow on trees nor appear on government demand. In the short term unemployed Americans need government assistance to ensure they have basic financial assistance, can keep a roof over their family’s heads and for re-training where that is feasible.

And as the economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman endlessly preaches, we also need to take advantage of the low cost of government borrowing to invest heavily in our human resources through increased spending in education, and on needed infrastructure improvements.   To cut spending now on these essential engines to our future prosperity as states struggle to balance their books is myopic and idiotic.

As for the deficit, we don’t need lessons on fiscal rectitude from a party that:

1. Drove us into two wars (and botched both of them),
2. Turned a budget surplus into a deficit quicker than you can say “Bush tax cuts for the rich,”
3. Passed into law an unfunded Medicare drug benefit to pander to and keep seniors in their political column,
4. Calls for fiscal austerity, but still wants extend Bush’s tax cuts for the rich even though their expiration would add hundreds of billions of dollars to the treasury,
5. Wants more spending on an already bloated Pentagon budget and on border fences with Mexico, and finally,
6. Whose deregulatory zeal got us into this mess in the first place.

Dick Cheney was wrong; deficits do matter – but not now.

I understand that Americans are unhappy with the Obama administration and congress for not fixing the economy. The fact is there are no easy answers or quick fixes to our economic doldrums, and much depends on what happens outside of our shores and beyond our control.  The impulse to hold someone, anyone, responsible for what ails us is strong.

Yet to elect more Republicans, a party bereft of ideas and only able to obstruct and impede government, is to invite paralysis to our policy making machinery and the infliction of more pain on those Americans who need our help in these times.  Please, let’s not cut off our noses to spite our faces in November.

From a column by Kenzaburo Oe in today’s New York Times:

Sixty-five years ago, after learning that a friend who was reported missing after the bombing of Hiroshima had turned up in a hospital there, my mother put together a meager care package and set out from our home in Shikoku to pay a visit. When she returned, she shared her friend’s description of that morning in August 1945.

Moments before the atomic bomb was dropped, my mother’s friend happened to seek shelter from the bright summer sunlight in the shadow of a sturdy brick wall, and she watched from there as two children who had been playing out in the open were vaporized in the blink of an eye. “I just felt outraged,” she told my mother, weeping.

From a speech delivered by President Barack Obama in Prague, April 5, 2009:

Some argue that the spread of these weapons cannot be stopped, cannot be checked -– that we are destined to live in a world where more nations and more people possess the ultimate tools of destruction. Such fatalism is a deadly adversary, for if we believe that the spread of nuclear weapons is inevitable, then in some way we are admitting to ourselves that the use of nuclear weapons is inevitable.

Just as we stood for freedom in the 20th century, we must stand together for the right of people everywhere to live free from fear in the 21st century. (Applause.) And as nuclear power –- as a nuclear power, as the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act. We cannot succeed in this endeavor alone, but we can lead it, we can start it.

I never had any doubts that the federal government’s financial bailout and the stimulus bill were needed to weather the economic storm that hit us in 2008.  Many people disagreed, but as the New York Times reported this week:

Now, two leading economists wielding complex quantitative models say that assertion can be empirically proved.

In a new paper, the economists argue that without the Wall Street bailout, the bank stress tests, the emergency lending and asset purchases by the Federal Reserve, and the Obama administration’s fiscal stimulus program, the nation’s gross domestic product would be about 6.5 percent lower this year.

In addition, there would be about 8.5 million fewer jobs, on top of the more than 8 million already lost; and the economy would be experiencing deflation, instead of low inflation.

The paper, by Alan S. Blinder, a Princeton professor and former vice chairman of the Fed, and Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, represents a first stab at comprehensively estimating the effects of the economic policy responses of the last few years.

“While the effectiveness of any individual element certainly can be debated, there is little doubt that in total, the policy response was highly effective,” they write.

That’s right.  If those who wanted our government to act like some dumbass tightwad had gotten their way, we would be in a depression now instead of working our way out of a recession.

I was one, and still am one that thinks the stimulus bill wasn’t big enough.  More government spending on much needed infrastructure projects would help create jobs, which would in turn create demand for goods and services, resulting in more economic growth.  Obama requested just enough stimulus money to weather the storm, but the storm has not passed, and he needs to ask for more to pull us out of this mess, but he won’t in this highly partisan environment, especially in a mid-term election year.

Ever since Democrats passed the stimulus bill in early 2009, Republicans in congress have attempted to portray themselves as born-again deficit hawks, eschewing their profligate ways during the George W Bush years.  Fortunately, this fiction has not survived the question of what to do about the Bush tax cuts for the rich which are due to expire.

The Obama administration intends to let them expire, thereby saving the treasury some $697 billion over 10 years.  GOP leaders, however, support an extension of all the Bush tax cuts because (and they even manage to say this with a straight face) they don’t add to the deficit at all since they stimulate the economy and actually pay for themselves.  This nonsense has been disproved so many times you’d think even Republicans would be embarrassed to trot it out again; but it does highlight, in addition to a certain obtuseness, their hypocrisy on the deficit.  According to the GOP, extending unemployment benefits to those hit hardest by this recession must be paid for with offsetting cuts elsewhere in the budget, but the rule shouldn’t apply to tax cuts on the wealthiest Americans least touched by the downturn. Sweet!

McConnell and others in the GOP explain the difference in terms of their opposition to government spending adding to the deficit, but this hardly concerned them when they were passing the Medicare drug benefit or appropriations for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – none of which were offset with spending cuts elsewhere.  Even now when pressed to identify specific and significant cuts to government spending in programs such as Medicare or Social Security or the defence budget, GOP spokespeople dodge and weave and obfuscate shamelessly without ever giving a straight answer.  Indeed, if you listen to them in other contexts, they insist not enough is being spent on things like border security.

This incoherence is fundamental to today’s national Republican Party and is guided by an essential right-wing conviction:  that an unfettered free market is paramount, and that government has no business and is essentially ineffective in all but a few areas such as national security.  The party therefore has no incentive to make government work efficiently or effectively either when they are in power or in opposition, since this would undermine their guiding principal.  This explains, for example, the utter incompetence of the Bush years when the GOP controlled both the White House and the congress, and the intransigence of today’s congressional Republicans as they strive to thwart any and all initiatives of the Obama administration.  For Republicans gridlock is good.

Voters should remember this as they go to the polls this fall.  By any reasonable standard, the Obama administration and congressional Democrats have accomplished a great deal in the last two years, virtually all of which I happen to believe, will be to the long term benefit of the country.  In the short term, the stimulus really did soften the blow of this deepest of economic downturns.  Yet the number of jobless is still way too high and Americans are feeling unsettled and grumpy; Democrats, unfairly or no, are likely to feel the brunt of their ire.  Republicans will benefit simply by being the party out of power. But a party as bereft of ideas as the GOP and whose policies and ideological devotion to deregulation largely caused the mess in the first place should not be rewarded with increased power and influence.  That is simply a recipe for prolonged national pain.

The U.S. Military invaded Afghanistan 9-1/2 years ago to topple the Taliban and capture Osama bin Laden.  Our number one reason for being there vacated the caves of Tora Bora just months after we arrived and, since then, the mission has been one of keeping the Taliban at bay and instituting some form of modern democracy in a country populated by people that aren’t to keen about change. 

Obama’s strategy has been to stabilize the country, get the Afghan military trained well enough to do the job themselves, and then get out. 

But today we learned that there’s gold in them there hills!  Well not so much gold, but a lot of other minerals that we need to keep our high-tech, battery powered economy going.  Today’s NYT reports:

The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.

The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.

An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and BlackBerrys.

The vast scale of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth was discovered by a small team of Pentagon officials and American geologists. The Afghan government and President Hamid Karzai were recently briefed, American officials said.

…

So far, the biggest mineral deposits discovered are of iron and copper, and the quantities are large enough to make Afghanistan a major world producer of both, United States officials said. Other finds include large deposits of niobium, a soft metal used in producing superconducting steel, rare earth elements and large gold deposits in Pashtun areas of southern Afghanistan.

Just this month, American geologists working with the Pentagon team have been conducting ground surveys on dry salt lakes in western Afghanistan where they believe there are large deposits of lithium. Pentagon officials said that their initial analysis at one location in Ghazni Province showed the potential for lithium deposits as large of those of Bolivia, which now has the world’s largest known lithium reserves.

Finally a reason to get greedy extraction-industry corporations interested enough in this war to wanna fight harder.   Maybe they’ll even be willing to help pay for it.

Mr. Fish delivers the news perfectly with this comic about the importance of what we’ve discovered that “was hidden beneath the feet of the worthless population” of Afghanistan.

One of the loudest complaints about the Democratic-controlled congress is that it has done little for and is out of touch with ordinary Americans, particularly during these trying economic times.  The facts suggest otherwise.

First, congress passed and President Obama signed the much maligned but nevertheless effective stimulus bill that provided a much needed fiscal boost to the economy at a critical time in the form of aid to states, tax cuts, unemployment payments, funding for green energy and other worthy projects.  The bill was, alas, oversold by the Obama administration but there is no question that it saved between one and two million jobs that would otherwise have been lost, and ameliorated the need for Draconian cuts by state governments suddenly faced with enormous budget deficits.

Second, about a year ago Obama signed a bill that afforded consumers more protection from the predatory practices of the credit card industry.

Third, in April Obama signed into law the most far reaching reform of health-care since Medicare and in so doing significantly strengthened America’s tattered social safety net.

And last but not least, congress is on the verge of passing significant financial reform legislation that takes a giant step towards curbing the sort of practices by banks and investment houses that nearly drove our economy into another Depression.

They have done this in the face of vociferous opposition from the powerful industries involved.  Each of these bills benefited ordinary, hard working Americans and, in the cases of the credit card bill of rights, health reform and the regulation of the financial industry, did so at the expense of Big Business or the wealthiest Americans.  Now that’s a change.  And second, they moved forward against the obstructionist opposition of a GOP only too willing to do the heavy lifting for the financial and medical insurance industries.  Does anyone think it’s a coincidence, for example, that political PAC money contributions from the financial industry are flowing away from Democrats, despite the fact that they control Congress and the White House, and to the Republicans?

It has been less than eighteen months since the Democrats took control in Washington.  In that time they have confounded conventional wisdom and the usual Washington cynicism to pass legislation that makes the lives of ordinary Americans more secure.  And they have accomplished this over the objections of powerful business interests who have been used to getting their own way.

Obama and congressional Democrats may be fairly faulted on some issues from both left and right; but not fighting for ordinary Americans isn’t one of them.

Story from The Birmingham News:

A Jefferson County teacher picked the wrong example when he used assassinating President Barack Obama as a way to teach angles to his geome­try students.

Someone alerted authorities and the Corner High School math teacher was questioned by the Secret Service, but was not taken into custody or charged with any crime.

“We did not find a credible threat,” said Roy Sexton, special agent in charge of Birmingham’s Secret Service office. “As far as the Secret Service is concerned, we looked into it, we talked to the gentleman and we have closed our investigation.”

The teacher was apparently teaching his geometry students about parallel lines and angles, officials said. He used the example of where to stand and aim if shooting Obama.

“He was talking about angles and said, ‘If you’re in this building, you would need to take this angle to shoot the president,’ ” said Joseph Brown, a senior in the geometry class.

…

Superintendent Phil Hammonds said the teacher remains at work, and there are no plans for termination.

“We are going to have a long conversation with him about what’s appropriate,” Hammonds said. “It was extremely poor judgment on his part, and a poor choice of words.”

That is a very bad example to use in a geometry lesson, but a very good example of extremely poor judgment.  If the Alabama teacher really wanted to use the killing of a black political figure to teach shooting angles, he probably should have used an historical example, not a hypothetical example using President Obama as a target.

Update: 

[The teacher] has been placed on paid administrative leave and faces possible termination, Superintendent Phil Hammonds said today.

Hammonds said his office has been flooded with phone calls from all over the nation since The Birmingham News reported that Corner High School geometry teacher Gregory Harrison used the assassination example while teaching.

Oh Alabama.
Can I see you
and shake your hand.
Make friends down in Alabama.
I’m from a new land
I come to you
and see all this ruin
What are you doing Alabama?
You got the rest of the union
to help you along
What’s going wrong?
 - Neil Young

Since President Obama’s inauguration in January 2009, the administration and Democrats in Congress have arguably:

Saved the United States economy from a meltdown which could easily have become a depression; given a new lease on life to the US automobile manufacturing industry whose collapse would have been disastrous to Michigan in particular and the Mid-West in general; put into law health-care legislation which fills a crucial hole in the nation’s frayed social safety net and taken a giant step towards ending the shame of being the only advanced country that doesn’t offer universal coverage to its citizens. And with luck, Congress will, by summer, pass an overhaul of the financial regulatory system which will be the most significant and far reaching in a generation to protect us from the sort of catastrophe that befell the nation at the end of the Bush administration.  Assuming, that is, the GOP hasn’t found a way to block it.

The Democrats’ reward for this impressive record of accomplishment from the American electorate will, at best, be a much reduced majority in both houses of Congress or, very possibly, the loss of one or both to the Republicans.  These are the same Republicans who have given the word “obstructionism” a whole new meaning and dimension; the same Republicans who have repeatedly put what they perceive as their political interests ahead of those of the country.

Yes the deficit is dangerously high and attributable in part to TARP and the 2009 stimulus bill. Yet most economists agree that the government couldn’t stand by and do nothing in the face of the sort of deep and destructive recession Obama inherited from the Bush administration. The $787 billion stimulus, passed with just one Republican vote in the Senate, gave a much needed boost to the economy and saved hard pressed states from devastating cuts to teachers, police and other critical public servants. And TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) which, in any case was passed at the end of the Bush administration, has been used wisely to prevent a disintegration of our financial system.

As for the health-care legislation, once Americans have penetrated the smokescreen of misinformation generated by the GOP, they will come to realize that at a time when money talks and Big Business rules, Democrats showed great political bravery and determination in striking a telling blow for ordinary, hardworking people who feel, and usually are, powerless in this political environment. The health care bill will ensure that wealth flows, just for a change, from the affluent to the benefit of those less well off in our society. 

Yet Americans see none of this.  Still grumpy because the economy remains weak, we will mindlessly punish those whom we blame for not fixing now what hasn’t had time to be mended; and reward those who did more than anyone to put us into the mess in the first place and have done nothing constructive to get us out of it. And as a bonus we will ensure political gridlock in which little that is useful can get done.

Where’s the sense or the justice in that?

The Arizona House of Representatives passed the “birther bill” this week that would require Arizona’s Secretary of State to “inspect a presidential candidate’s birth certificate before that candidate could qualify for the ballot.”  The bill was brought forth by “birthers” who are not questioning the citizenship of their own U.S. Senator John McCain who ran for president.  He was born at a military installation in the Panama Canal Zone.  They are questioning the citizenschip of President Barack Obama, who was born in Hawaii and and made his state-verified certificate of birth available to the press in July of 2008.  So why won’t these birthers go away?  Christopher Beam explains over at Slate:

The irony of all the birth-certificate proposals—similar bills have been introduced in six states—is that they contain the seeds of the birther movement’s destruction.  The moment Obama calls their bluff and hands his birth certificate to the Arizona secretary of state, it’s over.

In theory.  That’s the beauty of the birther myth, or any conspiracy theory:  No amount of evidence can ever completely dispel the questions.  When Obama produced his Hawaii birth certificate and the state of Hawaii verified it, it was a fake.  When reporters uncovered announcements of Obama’s birth in 1961 copies of the Honolulu Advertiser and the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, they had been planted.  If the Arizona secretary of state verified Obama’s birth certificate, that would be due to the government mind-control chip implanted in his molar.

To put all this another way:  Birtherism is here to stay.  And not because more people are going crazy, but because crazy has been redefined. Birtherism isn’t the only example.  Consider how conservatives accuse Obama of peddling “socialism.”  Sure, some of them genuinely think that Obama is going to usher in a new Soviet state in which the government owns all means of production.  But most right-wingers use it as shorthand for government overreach.  So now that’s what “socialism” means

The American Patriot Foundation has posted a letter from Army Lieutenant Colonel Terry Lakin telling President Obama that he will not carry out his orders until the Commander in Chief produces a document that verifies he was born in Hawaii.

…sir, until an original birth certificate is brought forward that validates your eligibility and puts to rest the other reasonable questions surrounding your unproven eligibility; I cannot in good conscience obey ANY military orders.

Of course Obama did release his birth certificate in 2008.

Hawaii state officials verifed that it is a genuine document that proves he was born in Hawaii.  And the state’s two newspapers published birth announcements. 

But that’s not good enough for Lakin.  Unless Obama allows him inspect the original document, he won’t be satisfied.  And until he’s satisfied, he’s not following orders.  By not following orders he risks being court-martialed and imprisoned. 

The “Safeguard Our Constitution”site is pleading for donations to cover his legal costs.  I have no idea what they’ve collected so far, but whatever the amount, it’s too much.  Lakin belongs in the brig.