sharing sacrifice for the few

Journalists in the Service of Pete Peterson

An essential and successful element of [idiot billionaire Pete Peterson's] strategy [of cutting Social Security] is to create an environment where it is widely if not universally believed that there is no alternative to his vision. In this view, it’s "not realistic" to believe the country can afford the same programs it once did. Those who are prepared to be "adults" will look at these "hard truths" without flinching and recognize that it is time to take citizens-have-to-do-with-less medicine.

The conceit is that those with "courage" will see past narrow, partisan concerns and embrace an ideal: a bipartisan consensus that has the strength to demand "shared sacrifice" from a childish and selfish populace.

A review of the proceedings of the [Peterson-sponsored] Fiscal Summits of the last three years makes agonizingly clear that most of the journalists who conducted interviews or moderated panel discussions both reflected and amplified the Peterson worldview — entirely unselfconsciously, it would seem.

So, for example, Lesley Stahl, the CBS 60 Minutes reporter, was fully a part of the Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson deficit-cutting team during her interview with both men: "You are going to have to raise taxes and cut things, big things, put restrictions on Social Security. Everybody knows that."

Virtually none of the reporters thought to ask about or suggest an alternative path, such as preserving Social Security benefits and bolstering the system’s reserve by raising the cap of wages subject to Social Security taxes (currently annual wages above approximately $110,000 are not subject to any Social Security tax).

tighten your belt because we don't have to

Blogger turned magazine publisher (or whatever) Josh Marshall did exemplary work back when Bush II was trying to privatize Social Security -- his blog kept running counts of which Democratic congresscritters were betraying their own constituents and eventually helped shame enough of them to thwart Junior.
This time around he's an Obot and only just woke up to the fact that fearless leader is proposing cuts to Social Security under the guise of "chained CPI" (a "settle for less" index). People, Obama isn't doing this to compromise with Republicans. He genuinely believes Social Security is "in crisis" (it's not) and has been saying so since the 2008 campaign. This is why it was hard to get excited about him in 2012: he stood a far better chance than Romney of sticking it to the old and infirm (despised by technocrats), because people think he is a liberal. Now he's doing it.

emerging markets: history of a buzz word

Yves Smith:

...Participants in public policy debates are often insensitive to how much ground they cede when they embrace the nomenclature used by their opponents. My personal bete noire is "free markets" which is actually an oxymoron. Another is "entitlements" which is code for "welfare." Why don’t people who favor programs like Social Security call them “social insurance’? Or “economic stabilizers”?

Or "catch a break programs"? The above quote precedes a guest post on Smith's blog by Robin Broad delving into the history of the term "emerging markets":

Perhaps the first use of the term “emerging” was in fact a positive one (as far as I’m concerned) – coming from the 1955 Bandung Conference, best known for leading to the establishment of the Non-Aligned Movement. At that point, the new “emerging” powers or nations or countries referred to former colonies gaining independence. Indonesian President Sukarno’s vision was that these “new emerging forces” would rival the colonial forces at places like the United Nations.

But what a difference almost three decades makes. Jump ahead to 1981 and the onset of the reign of free-market fundamentalism – when a man named Antoine van Agtmael coined the term “emerging market economy” as an alternative to “developing country.” And van Agtmael’s perch?: Deputy director of the capital markets department of the International Finance Corporation, the private-sector arm of the World Bank Group in Washington, D.C.

A side note: “Emerging markets” also was used by some after the collapse of the Soviet Union to refer to the “2nd world,” the former Soviet republics and satellites that were said to be “emerging” from socialism or communism to private-sector capitalism. (These are now more commonly referred to as “transition” economies.)

Back to the main plot: In the mid-1990s, van Agtmael’s “emerging markets” became even more defined and popularized – thanks to Bill Clinton’s activist Commerce Department under the leadership of Ron Brown. The term is typically associated with Jeffrey Garten, Brown’s Undersecretary of Commerce, and author of a speech (and later a book) entitled “The Big Emerging Markets.” The U.S. government’s concern wasn’t the poor and marginalized or poverty reduction in these poorer nations, but rather the roughly 10 countries “with the greatest potential for future export growth” (as Secretary Brown phrased it).

Meaning the growth of sales by US companies to various countries' former colonies. As the US gradually declines to GOP-led banana republic status, multinational capital is discovering new emerging markets in our own impoverished heartland: buyers' markets, that is, for labor, public infrastructure, coal, shale gas, student loans, foreclosed home rentals, etc. A rumored Obama pick for Commerce would certainly abet this trend.

but, but, you said...

Former US Labor Secretary Robert Reich notes:

Two central issues in the 2012 presidential election were whether the Bush tax cuts should be ended for people earning over $250,000, and whether Social Security and Medicare should be protected from future budget cuts.

The president said yes to both. Republicans said no. Obama won.

But he asks:

Why is the president back to making premature and unnecessary concessions to Republicans?

Perhaps because he lied? Obama shares the Washington consensus view that Social Security is "in trouble" and won't pay benefits to future generations. The consensus isn't accurate but reflects decades of hard-right propaganda from the likes of wealthy welfare-state haters such as Pete Peterson. Obama is an ideological technocrat, with "neo-liberal" economic views not very dissimilar from Peterson's: far from being Fox News-branded socialists, neo-liberals accept that running a government deficit is worse than creating misery for the lower classes. The opposing view, currently out of favor but very handy at getting us out of a Depression back in the last century, is that you run deficits when times are tough and repair the budget when people are more flush.

Social Security is a separate trust that has no impact on the deficit one way or another but under cover of deficit reduction, Obama has already begun de-funding it by lowering so-called payroll taxes that pay for it. That was in his last term -- now he argues cuts to it are necessary.

You had to laugh at all the O-bots who thought re-electing their man was such an urgent priority. Romney, a Republican, couldn't have cut the government's "catch a break" programs (as Bush found out in 2005, after claiming a mandate to do so). Obama, under cover of being a Democrat "faced with hard choices," can -- this has been called the Great Betrayal and it's happening before our eyes, just in time for the Mayan apocalypse.

Update: Revisions for tone.

around the WWW (worldwide wrestling)

"Why I Can't Vote for Obama" (bloggy) -- The post cites war crimes and rolling back limits on executive power; let's add the cat food commission and (late) blaming of the 2007 financial meltdown on public debt when the mess was clearly private sector-driven - "austerity or crisis" is far from our only choice

"New York Times Story Bizarrely Downplays Impact of Ocean Acidification" (Naked Capitalism) -- Hey, we can get by without a few shellfish

Stylish socks with a message from Rising Tensions

Matt Taibbi on Romney's debate BS.

Update: Richard Stallman, Why I Can't Support Obama