Monday, January 27, 2014
I THOUGHT IT WAS JUST BLOWHARD BIDEN
According to Joe Biden, the summer of 2010 was going to see the beginning of the Great Recovery and we all know how that turned out. I didn't realize until now that the White House was also pushing that bullshit:
(h/t Atrios)
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"This ended with a “morning in America” prediction that this could be “a breakthrough year for America. After five years of grit and determined effort, the United States is better-positioned for the 21st century than any other nation on Earth.” This put right up front the least convincing portion of the president’s speech. Nearly two-thirds of Americans think the country is on the wrong track. They think the economy is still lousy. And they are right. Twenty million people are in need of full-time work. Five years into the official recovery and we haven’t regained the jobs we had when the economy collapsed. Workers wages aren’t keeping up. The top 1 percent is capturing nearly all the income growth since the recovery began. The various Republicans responses — official, Tea Party, Latino, Paulista, whatever – displayed a striking absence of ideas or energy. But they all joined Americans in decrying the lousy economy. If the 2014 election is fought with Republicans running against the economy and Democrats trying to sell our progress, Democrats, and the country, will be in big trouble. The President Punts on the New Populism Obama pivoted from the “breakthrough year” back to the harsher reality that this economy isn’t working for working people. Profits are up, “people at the top have never done better,” but “the cold hard fact is that even in the midst of recovery, too many Americans are working more than ever just to get by, let alone get ahead. And too many aren’t working at all.” So why is this? Who rigged the rules that broke the middle class? What ideas and policies led us astray? What needs to be fixed to make it right? Here the president went into passive voice:
“Over more than three decades, even before the Great Recession hit, massive shifts in technology and global competition had eliminated a lot of good, middle-class jobs, and weakened the economic foundations that families depend on.”
Inequality just happened to us. It wasn’t the folly of trickle-down, supply-side voodoo economics. It wasn’t a corporate assault on workers and unions. It wasn’t bipartisan trade policies that racked up unprecedented and unsustainable trade deficits while hollowing out manufacturing. It wasn’t Wall Street freeing itself from regulation and blowing up the economy in a speculative wilding. Passive voice populism doesn’t cut it. It doesn’t help people understand how we got here nor how we get out. On the new populism, the president chose to punt. And his agenda reflected that. Sensible initiatives to expand research and development do more to capture a lead in renewable energy, encourage cutting-edge innovation. But no call for full employment. No demand that Congress act to rebuild the country and put people to work. No reiteration of the need to get billionaires and global corporations to pay their fair share of taxes so we can make public investments vital to America’s future. And, with Democrats sitting on their hands, the president dutifully made a somewhat dispirited call to pass fast-track trade authority in order to run another set of trade accords through Congress. Even the president didn’t look like he believed what he was peddling."
http://ourfuture.org/20140129/the-state-of-the-union-give-america-a-raise
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